4 ms·
> It look like each query cost 1.25$ to Kagi. Correction: they're saying 80 searches cost them ~1$. >Why does Kagi cost $10/month? >Our proposed price is dic
by dmos62 4y ago
> It look like each query cost 1.25$ 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 agoHow... 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 agoPerhaps amortizing really high salaries. $1M/month for a chief metrics officer or something.
- freediver 4y agoKagi is completely bootstrapped. It has basically 10 developers and me doing everything else. No managers. The expense is low as humanely possible as still coming out of my own pocket.
- prepend 4y agoI admire kagi a lot and will eventually pay you. You don’t have to answer, but how do you have such a high per search price?
- freediver 4y agoIt is the cost of commercial APIs that we use. We can't get volume discounts because we dont have volume, not are ever likely to have volume similar to free search engines. I'd challenge that the cost per search is actually very low. For just 1.25 cents, you can search the entire world wide web with any query, find what you need with no distractions and all that in just 500ms. The value of that search outcome for you can be $10 or even $100. It is probably the most amazing return on investment existing in the world today. Imagine for a second that Google and other search engine didn't exist, and someone offered you this deal today. I'd be you'd take it in a hearbeat. Heck you may even consider paying $1 per search or even $5. So the value is there. But today this value is anchored in the price of 'free' search. So instead $1 per search sounding like a good deal, we struggle to accept that 1.25 cents is. We hope that for a portion of people that 1.25 cents per search is going to sound like an amazing deal, especially as this is the only search relationship where the incentives of the information provider are aligned with the incentives of the information consumer.
- Kuinox 4y agoWhile I agree that it probably have a lot of value, the issues is human brains. I don't feel 1 cents per search is a good deal at all, while -logically- it probably will give me more than 1 cent of value out of it. People never thought about how much the knowledge they acquired is worth, most of the time they share it free of charge, people like to share, somes will even pay hosting to share knowledge ! That's why I don't believe in the pay-as-you-go I'm fine with a subscription, I don't pay to have more value out of my search, but because: 1. I dont like ads, I want to support an ad free alternative. 2. I pay for my privacy. 3. Better results will mean less time lost on searching, less frustration. I never accounted the value I will get out of better search, I looked at the price and felt that I was a bit overpriced for my taste, but I want an ad-free, pro privacy internet.
- coryfklein 4y agoIt's new software, features are always prioritized over cost efficency at the beginning when pressure to ship product overrides all.
- ezekg 4y agoI think I remember somewhere that they said a very high percentage of searches are totally unique i.e. never queried before thus not served from cache. I don't think they reword searches like Google does for a higher cache hit rate.
- howenterprisey 4y agoI never thought about that. That could explain a lot. Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway.
- ezekg 4y ago> Although I also recall Google themselves saying a lot of their queries are totally unique anyway. Which is probably why search quality is going down. They're rewriting your query to a more common way of saying the same thing, at least according to Google.
- Kuinox 4y agoFrom Kagi usage panel: Date-search count-generated cost >Jun 10, 2022 90 $1.12 They show conflicting numbers.