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The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (a

The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the business model does not require fiddling with your data in bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important activities we do every day both in personal and work setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the cost. It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)

dangus 5y ago
I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot. One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure. I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product. Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0. If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing. In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).
- freediver 5y ago
  > Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow. I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
The more expensive it is the better it will have to be relative to free alternatives though. Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per search which yields better results but higher cost per search?
feffe 5y ago
If it really starts to take off I think you should consider lowering the price. Initially I understand a higher price is required to be able to cover expenses. A price that is low enough to not matter would lure more customers into the fold (if the products deliver on its promise).
stayfrosty420 5y ago
tbh what your saying doesn't make sense to me vis. breaking even, unless there is some signifcant manual element to your search indexing. If this isn't the case, the revenue received from new customers should far outpace the marginal cost of supporting new customers unless you have signifcant fixed costs for some reason. I am interested in your product and will sign up for the beta and if it is quality would even be willing to pay the price if it was flawless quality, but i'd suggest doing some analysis vis. how many users you would need to reduce the price closer to somehting like $5 a month, which is far more palatable to me. Right now you're charging nearly as much as something like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix' worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as it's closer to your value proposition) for me to rationally justify the price.
tjalfi 5y ago
Have you considered adding business or enterprise subscriptions[0]? B2B users are a lot less price sensitive[1] than consumers especially when you're competing against a free product. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743
- freediver 5y ago
  Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas? On premise search. Businesses have lots of resources on their internal websites, but no easy way to search them in one place. Addition of role based search, when I'm logged and search only shows me resources I have access to.

dangus 5y ago

I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot. One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure. I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product. Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0. If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing. In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).

freediver 5y ago
> Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow. I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

The more expensive it is the better it will have to be relative to free alternatives though. Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per search which yields better results but higher cost per search?

feffe 5y ago

If it really starts to take off I think you should consider lowering the price. Initially I understand a higher price is required to be able to cover expenses. A price that is low enough to not matter would lure more customers into the fold (if the products deliver on its promise).

stayfrosty420 5y ago

tbh what your saying doesn't make sense to me vis. breaking even, unless there is some signifcant manual element to your search indexing. If this isn't the case, the revenue received from new customers should far outpace the marginal cost of supporting new customers unless you have signifcant fixed costs for some reason. I am interested in your product and will sign up for the beta and if it is quality would even be willing to pay the price if it was flawless quality, but i'd suggest doing some analysis vis. how many users you would need to reduce the price closer to somehting like $5 a month, which is far more palatable to me. Right now you're charging nearly as much as something like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix' worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as it's closer to your value proposition) for me to rationally justify the price.

tjalfi 5y ago

Have you considered adding business or enterprise subscriptions[0]? B2B users are a lot less price sensitive[1] than consumers especially when you're competing against a free product. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781133 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13843743

freediver 5y ago
Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas?
- sobkas 5y ago
  > Not really in a serious way, partly because I do not have an idea where would I start. Any ideas? On premise search. Businesses have lots of resources on their internal websites, but no easy way to search them in one place. Addition of role based search, when I'm logged and search only shows me resources I have access to.