Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?
Fair Pricing
431–440 of 512 posts
Re: Fair Pricing
#432A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute even more free translations. Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to lose some of your goodwi…
We are definetely not emailing you, it could be the service we use to crowdsource translations (localazy). I suggest removing the account from there or check their settings? (as we do not have control over these emails)
This is a very disappointing reply.
Anyway, yes, they come from a service you are using with the subject line "[Kagi Search] There Are Some Untranslated Phrases." I know how to unsubscribe or reroute emails to my spam folder.
Re: Fair Pricing
#433Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.
I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that would be added to my 100 free searches.
Re: Fair Pricing
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.
Kagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round Disclosure: I work at Kagi
Then thank you for the service. I'm using Kagi since a few months and I love you guys!
Re: Fair Pricing
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wish the unlimited plan was $5 instead of $10
I too wish that the things I might spend money on were half the price.
I just mean that I've got a lot of subscriptions, and it would be psychologically easier to justify a $5/mo subscription over $10/mo for search.
Re: Fair Pricing
#436This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it. So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you wou…
If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot more of them.
Basically you want per stream pricing.
Re: Fair Pricing
#437What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused credit ?
It just uses Stripe credit under the hood. So as long as you still have an account registered with us (active subscription or not), you can use that credit to resubscribe any time - or use it on other things, like API credits, or gift codes.
Re: Fair Pricing
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribe…
>[I]t's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it You characterize my position exactly right. I only point out there are many options people might not use Netflix for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it. >Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's…
> Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.
Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.
I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.
> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).
> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.
It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.
Re: Fair Pricing
#439Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences? I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?
I would say there are three major factors:
1. We have a diverse set of upstream sources. It would require all of them to be "compromised" for our results to completely tank.
2. We have a "crawler-lite" that solely collects info on page quality - number of ads/trackers detected, page speed, etc. - and we take that into account when ranking the results, generally nudging them down the page if "cleaner" ones can be found.
3. Our sole source of income is our users, and we actively respond to impacts in search quality that our users submit to us on our feedback form. If they are not happy with the results quality, then we are out of business.
Put simply: Our technology and business model is completely aligned to resist "enshittification". We have no reason to bias results or "sell out" to anyone.
With the momentum we've gathered, we are also taking first steps to building our own full scale index[1], both as a valuable contribution to the ecosystem of search and a contingency to reduce our reliance on 3rd parties.
[1]: Help us build it! https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html
Re: Fair Pricing
#440if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
We would like to eventually offer everyone an API credit stipend with their subscription. Our APIs should get plenty of love this year, so please stay tuned.
> also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.
Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.