9 ms·

It seems the trend lately for new services to be built with rather high monthly fees. From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month

by tmsbrg 5y ago

It seems the trend lately for new services to be built with rather high monthly fees. From the FAQ: "We plan to offer entry level plans for as low as $10/month, unlimited plan at around $20/mo as well as make bundles (to include Kagi email and other services), family plans and annual payment discounts available." I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford, and low quality services for the masses. Most of the world doesn't have the silicon valley salaries where $10/month is considered low. I feel like there should be an ideological consideration as well to make better services accessible to as many people as possible. Just my 2 cents.

muskmusk 5y ago
> I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford, and low quality services for the masses What do you mean? Like cars, houses, restaurants, groceries and almost literally everything else on the planet? :)
freediver 5y ago
> but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford If I may, there is huge complexity at hand here. It is one thing to offer a meditation app for $2/mo, where its peak complexity is changing colors on the screen. It is entire different to be able to offer the entire internet searchable in less than 500ms in the palm of your hand. The ability to offer that at $20-30/mo with robust privacy protection is frankly a miracle. Second factor, is that Kagi is bootstrapped and our priorities are quality of services offered, not the number of users. And knowing what I know, it is simply not economically viable to do this at a lower price point and hope for sustainability of the business. Finally, the price is only one side of equation, the other is value. The question is will you be getting enough value for your money? For me, the ability for my children to use a search engine without being bombarded with ads from an early age has a lot of value. I already pay $15/mo for YouTube Premium for the same reason. I understand that not every parent is in this position to choose, but many are. Having said all that I do not pretend that Kagi is designed to be for everyone, like Google is. It is a premium service for a reason - the cost of providing the quality that we provide is simply what it is, and we clearly said no to the ads from the get-go. Remember that the main reason most of the mainstream web is free are ads. The ideological consideration you refer to is something I agree with, but that role is on governments to fullfill IMO. I do not think they will anytime soon so I am doing what I can. Access to information like access to water should be part of public infrastructure and we miss the latter in the modern society (as public libraries are not enough anymore). We can easily get into the realm of politics here so I choose to stop :)
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Can you talk about why the price needs to be at the 20-30$ level and what infrastructure and engineering needs to be built / maintained / expanded on to run a search engine?
  - freediver 5y ago
    Here is a simplified example. Bing API is $7/1000 queries. Most users with HN pedigree search 100+ times a day. A single search for an error message can produce 10 follow up searches. That is $21/mo+ just in API cost a month. And we have lot of users hitting 200 queries/day limit (imposed in beta), so they would be hitting $40+/mo in API cost alone when we go live. This is cost without factoring infrastructure costs, other operating costs and salaries. In order to have a hope of becoming sustainable you need to make a calculation that with a certain number of users you can break even.
schleck8 5y ago
20 bucks per month is way too much, i like kagi but there isn't a justification for this price over free alternatives like duckduckgo
- spurgu 5y ago
  I would happily pay $20/month to remove the massive frustrations I've had with modern search engines.
- eitland 5y ago
  Try it free then ask your boss to pay it. For me at least it saves me whole minutes and lots of stress on about half my queries which means at $20 it pays for itself in half a month and as a free bonus I get better results for the rest of the month as well, an ad free experience, no tracking and the opportunity to support a Google competitor.
- petard 5y ago
  I agree that 20 bucks is relatively a lot of money. On the flipside, running a search engine does not come for free, curious what the costs of Google would be without the ads.
karimf 5y ago
Well, services accessible to as many people as possible? Google, Facebook, Instagram? Is there any possible way to do that without using advertisement as the business model?
- bluish29 5y ago
  In US, something like this can exist but usually will be called communist.
gkasev 5y ago
This is a fair point, high quality services should be available to all. That being said, the idea of paid search is quite novel and you need to target early adopters first. In my mind, this service is priced for early adopters and I only hope that the business is profitable from the very beginning. For me what WhatsApp used to charge for their service (1$ a year) is the epitome of high quality service for the masses. I would be very happy to see a service like Kagi scale to that with time.
ejb999 5y ago
Not really sure that you need a 'silicon valley salary' to afford $10/month. Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service. Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google searches I for one would be OK with it.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  And how many people share their logins to avoid having a bunch of fees from different services? I bet its more common on the lower end of the income spectrum. When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    > When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight Correct. But what Volvo invented (3 point safety belt and more) soon became standard in ordinary cars. Say Kagi is a luxury product for some people: it will still open the road for others to see that it is possible to carve out a niche that isn't as crowded as ad-sponsored-idiotic-AI-manipulated-answers-for-everyone-and-noone-at-the-same-time. Neeva is freemium. I think you.com is freemium too. Marginalia is free and at this point so good that it is sometimes a better fallback from DDG than Google is. (To be fair, Marginalia is a side project running on a single desktop pc in Sweden somewhere but Google is that bad these days that if DDG doesn't have you covered chanses are Google doesn't either. And then marginalia comes in with a delightfully different ranking, respecting my queries and allowing me to find things - if they exists in its index.)
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Actually the comparison with Netflix is quite apt. For twice the price I get lots (and I really mean lots) of shows streamed to my house. In contrast here, here I get a search service that is provided by others for free. For the average Joe the value proposition is very different. So you really have to be valuing privacy very strongly and/or have significant disposible income. Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.
Semaphor 5y ago
Note that their pricing discussions are rather open in their discord. They use both Google and Bing API for searches, which isn’t cheap (they said about $12/1000 queries).
vitro 5y ago
I really like the approach I've seen at https://draculatheme.com https://draculatheme.com when you go to the purchase page of their PRO offering. > Hey! You're coming from Some country where this could be too expensive. > I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable. > If you need it, use the code SOMECODE for an extra XX% off the regular price. I'm fine with paying, but it should respect purchasing power in each country. And I'd even go that far and offer the service free in some really poor countries.
- kajiryoji 5y ago
  Not sure I found what you mentioned on the page you linked to
  - vitro 5y ago
    Perhaps you are viewing it from a country, that has purchasing power this pricing was designed to. I'm viewing it from Czech Republic and see the message there. There was a small discussion on HN previously about Dracula theme and this exact aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524
omnicognate 5y ago
If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit. The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost to running the whole thing. If few people use it, it will cost a lot. I agree that it's not good for things to split into premium paid services only affordable by the well off and rubbish free services for everyone else. However the solution isn't to abandon building services like this with funding models that correctly align incentives. It's for there to be a culture change towards understanding and valuing those well aligned incentives. This will bring more users, more services, more competition and much lower costs for users.
- pelasaco 5y ago
  > If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.
  - omnicognate 5y ago
    If it were culturally accepted that search is something you need to pay for then yes, I am extremely confident it would come to cost very, very little per user. A startup with a small user base may well grow the way you say, but in a mature industry providing a commodity service to most of the population, margins will be squeezed razor thin and the prices will reflect the actual cost to provide. Note that I'm not saying this is what will happen. I replied to a comment that was more about how we should want things to turn out. I'm saying we shouldn't denounce customer-paid startups for charging what they need to succeed in traditionally ad-funded industries, even if that means they start out as premium services for those willing and able to pay. Rather, we should cheer them on and advocate for the benefits their funding model brings, in the hope that they will succeed, grow, become commoditised and benefit everyone for pennies. The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.
mda 5y ago
Yeah, I am not sure if this will work, you can always install an adblocker and use Google or some bing based stuff instead, what is the value proposition exactly? I don't think their search results are any better honestly.

by tmsbrg 5y ago

muskmusk 5y ago

> I have to say I support a lot of these initiatives, but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford, and low quality services for the masses What do you mean? Like cars, houses, restaurants, groceries and almost literally everything else on the planet? :)

freediver 5y ago

> but I can't help but think altogether they're creating a division of the web into premium services the rich can afford If I may, there is huge complexity at hand here. It is one thing to offer a meditation app for $2/mo, where its peak complexity is changing colors on the screen. It is entire different to be able to offer the entire internet searchable in less than 500ms in the palm of your hand. The ability to offer that at $20-30/mo with robust privacy protection is frankly a miracle. Second factor, is that Kagi is bootstrapped and our priorities are quality of services offered, not the number of users. And knowing what I know, it is simply not economically viable to do this at a lower price point and hope for sustainability of the business. Finally, the price is only one side of equation, the other is value. The question is will you be getting enough value for your money? For me, the ability for my children to use a search engine without being bombarded with ads from an early age has a lot of value. I already pay $15/mo for YouTube Premium for the same reason. I understand that not every parent is in this position to choose, but many are. Having said all that I do not pretend that Kagi is designed to be for everyone, like Google is. It is a premium service for a reason - the cost of providing the quality that we provide is simply what it is, and we clearly said no to the ads from the get-go. Remember that the main reason most of the mainstream web is free are ads. The ideological consideration you refer to is something I agree with, but that role is on governments to fullfill IMO. I do not think they will anytime soon so I am doing what I can. Access to information like access to water should be part of public infrastructure and we miss the latter in the modern society (as public libraries are not enough anymore). We can easily get into the realm of politics here so I choose to stop :)

Melatonic 5y ago
Can you talk about why the price needs to be at the 20-30$ level and what infrastructure and engineering needs to be built / maintained / expanded on to run a search engine?
- freediver 5y ago
  Here is a simplified example. Bing API is $7/1000 queries. Most users with HN pedigree search 100+ times a day. A single search for an error message can produce 10 follow up searches. That is $21/mo+ just in API cost a month. And we have lot of users hitting 200 queries/day limit (imposed in beta), so they would be hitting $40+/mo in API cost alone when we go live. This is cost without factoring infrastructure costs, other operating costs and salaries. In order to have a hope of becoming sustainable you need to make a calculation that with a certain number of users you can break even.

schleck8 5y ago

20 bucks per month is way too much, i like kagi but there isn't a justification for this price over free alternatives like duckduckgo

spurgu 5y ago
I would happily pay $20/month to remove the massive frustrations I've had with modern search engines.
eitland 5y ago
Try it free then ask your boss to pay it. For me at least it saves me whole minutes and lots of stress on about half my queries which means at $20 it pays for itself in half a month and as a free bonus I get better results for the rest of the month as well, an ad free experience, no tracking and the opportunity to support a Google competitor.
petard 5y ago
I agree that 20 bucks is relatively a lot of money. On the flipside, running a search engine does not come for free, curious what the costs of Google would be without the ads.

karimf 5y ago

Well, services accessible to as many people as possible? Google, Facebook, Instagram? Is there any possible way to do that without using advertisement as the business model?

bluish29 5y ago
In US, something like this can exist but usually will be called communist.

gkasev 5y ago

This is a fair point, high quality services should be available to all. That being said, the idea of paid search is quite novel and you need to target early adopters first. In my mind, this service is priced for early adopters and I only hope that the business is profitable from the very beginning. For me what WhatsApp used to charge for their service (1$ a year) is the epitome of high quality service for the masses. I would be very happy to see a service like Kagi scale to that with time.

ejb999 5y ago

Not really sure that you need a 'silicon valley salary' to afford $10/month. Netflix charges almost double this and they have 100's of millions of subscribers worldwide; my guess is that a premium search engine only needs a small fraction of that number of users to become a worthwhile and profitable service. Can't say if I would pay for it or not - haven't used it yet - but if that was the price of dumping google searches I for one would be OK with it.

netizen-936824 5y ago
And how many people share their logins to avoid having a bunch of fees from different services? I bet its more common on the lower end of the income spectrum. When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight
- skinkestek 5y ago
  > When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight Correct. But what Volvo invented (3 point safety belt and more) soon became standard in ordinary cars. Say Kagi is a luxury product for some people: it will still open the road for others to see that it is possible to carve out a niche that isn't as crowded as ad-sponsored-idiotic-AI-manipulated-answers-for-everyone-and-noone-at-the-same-time. Neeva is freemium. I think you.com is freemium too. Marginalia is free and at this point so good that it is sometimes a better fallback from DDG than Google is. (To be fair, Marginalia is a side project running on a single desktop pc in Sweden somewhere but Google is that bad these days that if DDG doesn't have you covered chanses are Google doesn't either. And then marginalia comes in with a delightfully different ranking, respecting my queries and allowing me to find things - if they exists in its index.)
cycomanic 5y ago
Actually the comparison with Netflix is quite apt. For twice the price I get lots (and I really mean lots) of shows streamed to my house. In contrast here, here I get a search service that is provided by others for free. For the average Joe the value proposition is very different. So you really have to be valuing privacy very strongly and/or have significant disposible income. Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.

Semaphor 5y ago

Note that their pricing discussions are rather open in their discord. They use both Google and Bing API for searches, which isn’t cheap (they said about $12/1000 queries).

vitro 5y ago

I really like the approach I've seen at https://draculatheme.com https://draculatheme.com when you go to the purchase page of their PRO offering. > Hey! You're coming from Some country where this could be too expensive. > I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable. > If you need it, use the code SOMECODE for an extra XX% off the regular price. I'm fine with paying, but it should respect purchasing power in each country. And I'd even go that far and offer the service free in some really poor countries.

kajiryoji 5y ago
Not sure I found what you mentioned on the page you linked to
- vitro 5y ago
  Perhaps you are viewing it from a country, that has purchasing power this pricing was designed to. I'm viewing it from Czech Republic and see the message there. There was a small discussion on HN previously about Dracula theme and this exact aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495524

omnicognate 5y ago

If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit. The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost to running the whole thing. If few people use it, it will cost a lot. I agree that it's not good for things to split into premium paid services only affordable by the well off and rubbish free services for everyone else. However the solution isn't to abandon building services like this with funding models that correctly align incentives. It's for there to be a culture change towards understanding and valuing those well aligned incentives. This will bring more users, more services, more competition and much lower costs for users.

pelasaco 5y ago
> If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all. Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  If it were culturally accepted that search is something you need to pay for then yes, I am extremely confident it would come to cost very, very little per user. A startup with a small user base may well grow the way you say, but in a mature industry providing a commodity service to most of the population, margins will be squeezed razor thin and the prices will reflect the actual cost to provide. Note that I'm not saying this is what will happen. I replied to a comment that was more about how we should want things to turn out. I'm saying we shouldn't denounce customer-paid startups for charging what they need to succeed in traditionally ad-funded industries, even if that means they start out as premium services for those willing and able to pay. Rather, we should cheer them on and advocate for the benefits their funding model brings, in the hope that they will succeed, grow, become commoditised and benefit everyone for pennies. The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.

mda 5y ago

Yeah, I am not sure if this will work, you can always install an adblocker and use Google or some bing based stuff instead, what is the value proposition exactly? I don't think their search results are any better honestly.