12 ms·

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?

heretogetout 4y ago
I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
  - pitched 4y ago
    Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
  - CrendKing 4y ago
    > I'm either overpaying The company is aiming to have many users that everyone is overpaying with their $10, so that they make money, thanks to the reduced marginal cost. And the company hopes that the $10 is low enough that enough everyone knows they are overpaying they are still willing.
Kuinox 4y ago
From their usage panel, I do 50-200 research per day. In 10 days my usage cost is estimated at 11.69$. It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.
- dmos62 4y ago
  > It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$. >Why does Kagi cost $10/month? >Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. >Someone searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3. An average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal due to testing etc. >Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it. >The free plan will be limited to 50 searches a month (and this too has to be paid by paying customers which makes the above math even harder).
  - corrral 4y ago
    How... do 80 searches cost them a dollar? That seems insanely high unless they're counting fixed costs that'll go down fast (on a per-search basis) as they get more subscribers. 8,000 searches costing a dollar, in actual resource use? OK, maybe. Still seems a little high, but maybe. 80? Are they paying someone to manually look things up for you?
    - prepend 4y ago
      Perhaps amortizing really high salaries. $1M/month for a chief metrics officer or something.
      - 4y ago
goda90 4y ago
Yeah, $10 is steep, but I feel like I'd be happy with a bundle deal. Search, reliable email, a small bit of storage, and other small services for $20 or $30. I'm sure I'm underestimating how much I use search, but it just doesn't feel like an essential part of my life that I'd want to pay that much.
- ezekg 4y ago
  I'd honestly rather see Kagi focus entirely on search and not try to branch out too much. These days, I think startups try to chew up too many markets at once instead of really honing in on one.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    100% agree. Maybe I'm missing something but where's the synergy between search and email + storage unless you're harvesting data?
    - freediver 4y ago
      The synergy is in the fact that email and storage are high margin products. We are currently basically losing money on search. Cost of providing email per user is negligible (compared to search) but you could double the price and make the economics work.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
As someone who prefers to search in private tabs, I was wondering why do I need to create an account, until I saw the pricing. It's an interesting conundrum, either you search anonymously with bloat and ads, or have your activity pinned to your account maybe with ads, or guaranteed without ads for $10/month. As much as it bothers me, I'd prefer to work around the first option.
- rc_mob 4y ago
  they now have a browser plugin that allows search in private tabs
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    All searches are logged to your account which is tied to your credit card / kpi.
    - freediver 4y ago
      They are not. See kagi.com/privacy
      - ASalazarMX 4y ago
        They promise never ever to share your confidential info, but that promise wouldn't be necessary if they didn't have it in the first place. I understand they need it for customization and monetization, but search queries are too private to ask for trust.
geysersam 4y ago
I'd love if more services worked this way. Same for streaming, YouTube etc.
freediver 4y ago
Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet. In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price. Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise. We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Maybe you could do something similar to Google Fi's pricing model for data usage. You pick a monthly amount of data, say 2GB, for a monthly price of $40. Any GB you use in excess of that is $10 per GB up to a maximum of $80, and data usage is unlimited after that. I would bet that my usage most months would not exceed $5, and I think many other prospective users would be willing to gamble on that as well. Food for thought.
- janandonly 4y ago
  Too bad a pay-per-search model was not adopted. But would it be a big trouble to let users choose? * Say 1 search is 5 cents. So unless a person searched less than 200 times a month, the pay-per-search is cheaper.... * Or why not adopt the model where you pay 5 cents per search _for the first 200 searched_ and nothing afterwards (so the ceiling is $10 per month)? Relevant Tweet: https://twitter.com/janhodl3/status/1535530318987509761 https://twitter.com/janhodl3/status/1535530318987509761

Huh, $10 a month is pretty steep. It's great that they offer a free plan, but that comes with all the misaligned incentives again. Any reason they don't just do pay-per-use (1 cent per query)?

heretogetout 4y ago

I don't think charging per query would work for most folks, for the same reason micropayments to bloggers or what have you won't work: it discourages use. If you know that every time you hit enter on a search query will cost you something, anything, you'll hesitate. You might choose to just use Google and use your data to pay for your search instead.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MauranKilom 4y ago
But that's kind of the point: It always costs Kagi that amount when you do a search (according to their pricing page). If the relationship between user and Kagi is not supposed to be adversarial, then indeed the "price vs value" tradeoff needs to be resolved on the user side. At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed. One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)
- pitched 4y ago
  Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
- CrendKing 4y ago
  > I'm either overpaying The company is aiming to have many users that everyone is overpaying with their $10, so that they make money, thanks to the reduced marginal cost. And the company hopes that the $10 is low enough that enough everyone knows they are overpaying they are still willing.

Kuinox 4y ago

From their usage panel, I do 50-200 research per day. In 10 days my usage cost is estimated at 11.69$. It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. I don't want to be conscientious of the cost of my search usage, I fear it will inconsciously reduce my search usage and access to knowledge.

dmos62 4y ago
> It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$. >Why does Kagi cost $10/month? >Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. >Someone searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3. An average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal due to testing etc. >Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it. >The free plan will be limited to 50 searches a month (and this too has to be paid by paying customers which makes the above math even harder).
- corrral 4y ago
  How... do 80 searches cost them a dollar? That seems insanely high unless they're counting fixed costs that'll go down fast (on a per-search basis) as they get more subscribers. 8,000 searches costing a dollar, in actual resource use? OK, maybe. Still seems a little high, but maybe. 80? Are they paying someone to manually look things up for you?
  - prepend 4y ago
    Perhaps amortizing really high salaries. $1M/month for a chief metrics officer or something.
    - 4y ago

goda90 4y ago

Yeah, $10 is steep, but I feel like I'd be happy with a bundle deal. Search, reliable email, a small bit of storage, and other small services for $20 or $30. I'm sure I'm underestimating how much I use search, but it just doesn't feel like an essential part of my life that I'd want to pay that much.

ezekg 4y ago
I'd honestly rather see Kagi focus entirely on search and not try to branch out too much. These days, I think startups try to chew up too many markets at once instead of really honing in on one.
- geysersam 4y ago
  100% agree. Maybe I'm missing something but where's the synergy between search and email + storage unless you're harvesting data?
  - freediver 4y ago
    The synergy is in the fact that email and storage are high margin products. We are currently basically losing money on search. Cost of providing email per user is negligible (compared to search) but you could double the price and make the economics work.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

As someone who prefers to search in private tabs, I was wondering why do I need to create an account, until I saw the pricing. It's an interesting conundrum, either you search anonymously with bloat and ads, or have your activity pinned to your account maybe with ads, or guaranteed without ads for $10/month. As much as it bothers me, I'd prefer to work around the first option.

rc_mob 4y ago
they now have a browser plugin that allows search in private tabs
- ipaddr 4y ago
  All searches are logged to your account which is tied to your credit card / kpi.
  - freediver 4y ago
    They are not. See kagi.com/privacy
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      They promise never ever to share your confidential info, but that promise wouldn't be necessary if they didn't have it in the first place. I understand they need it for customization and monetization, but search queries are too private to ask for trust.

geysersam 4y ago

I'd love if more services worked this way. Same for streaming, YouTube etc.

freediver 4y ago

Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet. In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price. Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise. We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)

DangitBobby 4y ago
Maybe you could do something similar to Google Fi's pricing model for data usage. You pick a monthly amount of data, say 2GB, for a monthly price of $40. Any GB you use in excess of that is $10 per GB up to a maximum of $80, and data usage is unlimited after that. I would bet that my usage most months would not exceed $5, and I think many other prospective users would be willing to gamble on that as well. Food for thought.
janandonly 4y ago
Too bad a pay-per-search model was not adopted. But would it be a big trouble to let users choose? * Say 1 search is 5 cents. So unless a person searched less than 200 times a month, the pay-per-search is cheaper.... * Or why not adopt the model where you pay 5 cents per search _for the first 200 searched_ and nothing afterwards (so the ceiling is $10 per month)? Relevant Tweet: https://twitter.com/janhodl3/status/1535530318987509761 https://twitter.com/janhodl3/status/1535530318987509761