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Fair Pricing

kagi.com

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Re: Fair Pricing

#91

Post by dgoldstein0 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #73
larusso wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that. About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.

Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult. The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships. Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to ne…

Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.

Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.

And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.

Re: Fair Pricing

#92

Post by nicce »

grayhatter wrote: post #45
nicce wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before. [citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all. I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might…

> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it. Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nea…

> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.

Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.

If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.

About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.

Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.

Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.

Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.

People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.

People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.

Re: Fair Pricing

#93

Post by paranoidrobot »

vincnetas wrote: post #25

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated f…

Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.

I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.

Re: Fair Pricing

#94

Post by Vexowsky »

tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.

Re: Fair Pricing

#95

Post by icar »

I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.

Re: Fair Pricing

#97

Post by eviks »

fnord123 wrote: post #82
dirkc wrote: post #75

This 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…

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

Re: Fair Pricing

#98

Post by cyberax »

Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.

That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.

Re: Fair Pricing

#99

Post by barnabee »

ciphix wrote: post #72

This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.

Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).

Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.

[0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv` installed)

Re: Fair Pricing

#100

Post by butterNaN »

They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!
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