Update to Kagi Search Pricing

> It used to be 1.25 cents per search. Microsoft recently increased Bing search results API cost to 2.8 cents per search

I guess Microsoft decided to switch their strategy from "help startups take market share from Google" to "kill the competition and try to get users to search on Bing"?

Enthusiastic paying Kagi user here and I felt the same. What helped is to find the "Usage" section of my account (under the Billing section) to see how many searches I've been doing in past months. In March, so far, I've done 180. I wonder if they count "!g" searches? I don't use this often, but I'm curious.

We are all waking up to realize what it takes to run a profitable search company without ads and surveillance capitalism. I am genuinely happy with Kagi's service, but I am confident that less-technical users would rather just keep using "free" search like Google, Bing, etc. The vast majority of users just don't know or care about privacy, and even if they do, the vast majority of people in the world aren't going to pay for search!

Kagi is a bit of a HN darling so I know I'm putting my neck out here, but even after trying the trial, I'm not sure what the value prop is.

I would happily pay for a search engine that provided good results, but seeing as it's ostensibly Just Bing under the hood, I'm not sure what I get that I'm not getting from DDG or MetaGer + an ad blocker.

Kagi doesn't strike me as a privacy alternative given that all my searches are necessarily tied to a user id which is further tied to a payment method.

Finally, the metered usage feels far too much like an ancient cell phone plan. I really hate the idea of me paying for search only to have to switch to actual Bing when I hit some limit.

I like what Kagi is trying to do, but I don't see it as either sustainable or awfully useful unless such a service owns its index.

Feel free to let me know what I missed, I'm sure Kagi's paying customers are paying for a reason!

> Q. Where does the search usage data (99% of users search less than 200 times a month) come from? A. The average person searches Google three or four times per day. (90-120 times per month)(...) According to DuckDuckGo’s data, the monthly average is about 30 searches per person or one per day.

The average does not imply anything about a distribution, and the links provided do not back up this claim at all. Furthermore, Kagi's target audience is not composed of average users. I find it quite misleading because Kagi could provide data from its own user base to answer this question.

I don’t understand how they think 1000 searches per month is enough for a family. Also the cost of additional searches makes it a non starter for my family.

Looks like pay per view has finally come to web searches as well.