4 ms·

Kagi would be smart to offer a few tiers of service to encourage paid adoption. Have a pricey one time lifetime fee that goes up in price each year. Have a reas

• version_five 4y ago
  I think they are transparent about how much each query costs them and are trying to run a sustainable business. I personally prefer paying for that- basically a market rate for search, than trying to jump on to a growth hacking scheme of lifetime memberships or merch subsidies.
• calvinmorrison 4y ago
  How about, pay per search?
  • galleywest200 4y ago
    The Kagi Teams plan is essentially pay-per-search: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-team-plan
  • shepherdjerred 4y ago
    They essentially already do this. They expose how much you've costed them as a customer, and if it's more than what you've paid in subscription fees, you can tip the difference.
    • antisthenes 4y ago
      And what if it's less?
  • howenterprisey 4y ago
    That's planned, as I recall.
• charcircuit 4y ago
  Constantly increasing the price will price out more and more potential customers. I think it would work better if they added ads and other forms of revenue so they can lower the price.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    Has there ever been an advertising-supported product that turned out to be respectable/useful for its users in the long run? We all know how Google turned out, and that's despite themselves admitting early on that an ad-based search engine would have misaligned incentives.
    • mgreg 4y ago
      Craigslist and Stackoverflow come to mind.
  • g_p 4y ago
    Part of the challenge is getting people to see the true cost of the free services they consume. The internet today defaults to the "all you can eat buffet" post-scarcity world. The kagi team are transparent about what it actually costs them (in cash) for searches you make. If they go down the advertising route, they'll just become another Google, as the incentives are not aligned. First you'll get more ads onto the page to crowd out organic content. Then you'll subtly adjust what users search for, or what you return, to ensure you optimise for your highest paying ads. Then you'll hyper localise to make even more from sponsored listings etc. If we want an internet where users aren't the product, there needs to be more transparency about what "free" things are actually costing in compute resource and similar. And ultimately a user has to either bring in more money than they cost (not ideal in developing countries where ad impressions and clicks can be worth a lot less), pay for what they use with a margin on top, or the company has to go onto the VC treadmill of promising greater future returns from eyeballs (back to advertising and data brokering again....) Therefore while it is expensive compared with free, they're also being transparent about their real costs, and what the services that are free elsewhere (with monetisation) are actually having to make from selling ads to you to break even.
• mdaniel 4y ago
  > Make it easy to organize bookmarks, share search results and curate search lists. Plus I think that bookmarks, shared search results, and curated searches (for whatever that means) are an implicit version of Page Rank, since of the bazillions of URLs in the world, ones which are bookmarked are by definition more valuable than others and should be refreshed more often and whose in and out links are also themselves probably more valuable. I'd argue the same thing for any URL that got the archive.ph treatment (if those are available) or manually saved archive.org snapshot