16 ms·

Update to Kagi Search Pricing

204 points by exists 4y ago

crisp 4y ago
Yep, that's it for me. A loyal, paying customer all the way from beta days doesn't seem to matter much. I truly hoped they would have kept their word and grandfathered the old subscriptions. Burning your money on the AI and browser nonesense is on you. Don't count me in.
kervantas 4y ago
I tried it out today for a full day to see whether I should quickly subscribe to get the legacy professional benefits. I found having a limit on the number of allowed searches really uncomfortable. So it is a nope for me at this price. Also, the search engine market is really heating up. We have - Bing with a GPT chatbot - Brave Search with lenses, similar to Kagi - DuckDuckGo with a limited chatbot - Swurl is cool as well (but I think that is just a frontend for Google) ...and they are all free to use. I am not sure if Kagi will survive another year with this business model. IMO, they should focus on freeing themselves from Bing's API and build their own indexes to drive down costs, and also drop anything AI related gimmick, and embrace the UNIX philosophy: do one ting well.
zapatos 4y ago
> It used to be 1.25 cents per search. Microsoft recently increased Bing search results API cost to 2.8 cents per search I guess Microsoft decided to switch their strategy from "help startups take market share from Google" to "kill the competition and try to get users to search on Bing"?
aix1 4y ago
I just read the update and my first reaction is that the pricing structure seems fairly complicated.
- aorth 4y ago
  Enthusiastic paying Kagi user here and I felt the same. What helped is to find the "Usage" section of my account (under the Billing section) to see how many searches I've been doing in past months. In March, so far, I've done 180. I wonder if they count "!g" searches? I don't use this often, but I'm curious. We are all waking up to realize what it takes to run a profitable search company without ads and surveillance capitalism. I am genuinely happy with Kagi's service, but I am confident that less-technical users would rather just keep using "free" search like Google, Bing, etc. The vast majority of users just don't know or care about privacy, and even if they do, the vast majority of people in the world aren't going to pay for search!
  - aix1 4y ago
    I read in the FAQ that "bang" searches (e.g. !g) don't count towards usage.
jszymborski 4y ago
Kagi is a bit of a HN darling so I know I'm putting my neck out here, but even after trying the trial, I'm not sure what the value prop is. I would happily pay for a search engine that provided good results, but seeing as it's ostensibly Just Bing under the hood, I'm not sure what I get that I'm not getting from DDG or MetaGer + an ad blocker. Kagi doesn't strike me as a privacy alternative given that all my searches are necessarily tied to a user id which is further tied to a payment method. Finally, the metered usage feels far too much like an ancient cell phone plan. I really hate the idea of me paying for search only to have to switch to actual Bing when I hit some limit. I like what Kagi is trying to do, but I don't see it as either sustainable or awfully useful unless such a service owns its index. Feel free to let me know what I missed, I'm sure Kagi's paying customers are paying for a reason!
- sshine 4y ago
  I’m a paying customer. I pay mainly as an experiment to figure out what my searches actually cost. If those costs are covered by advertisers that I block, my free search experience is paid for by people who don’t block those ads. I don’t like that thought. I may go back to DDG if the new payment structure is insufficient (I don’t know if I search more than 1.000 times a month). But it is somewhat eye-opening how much I take search for granted.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    If you click into your kagi billing, there is a usage dashboard. I thought I'd be fine with the 700 searches a month.. but my average is 1600. $300/year for a search engine is probably more than I am willing to pay, especially for an individual subscription.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  I used to use DDG, but the search results were so bad that I had to !g all the time. With Kagi, the results (which are mixed from various services, not just Bing) are actively superior to Google (so much less spam!) almost all the time, and the only Google search service I still use regularly is Maps. That said, while I've been happily paying $10/mo for the pro plan for a while, I'm not convinced the 1000 searches/mo will suffice. Guess I'll find out soon enough. Update: I checked https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption and to my surprise I'm averaging under 20 searches a day total, even though Kagi is my main search engine on both mobile and desktop. So looks like I'll be OK after all.
nifoc 4y ago
I'm a happy Kagi customer, but going from $10/mo to $25/mo seems like a very steep increase. (I realize that much of it is probably driven by Bing more than doubling the price for their API results.) One thing that feels kind of disingenuous to me is the number of searches that "a normal user" does in a month. The blog post mentions it several times, but they always reference numbers provided by Google or DDG. I have a feeling that the numbers for their "tech-savvy and heavy users of search" are _way_ higher than the averages of Google and DDG. At my current usage, I would have to go with the $25/mo plan once my current subscription is up.
epups 4y ago
> Q. Where does the search usage data (99% of users search less than 200 times a month) come from? A. The average person searches Google three or four times per day. (90-120 times per month)(...) According to DuckDuckGo’s data, the monthly average is about 30 searches per person or one per day. The average does not imply anything about a distribution, and the links provided do not back up this claim at all. Furthermore, Kagi's target audience is not composed of average users. I find it quite misleading because Kagi could provide data from its own user base to answer this question.
raybb 4y ago
Here are my search counts and costs to Kagi for the recent months as a student, mostly traveling in Feb. Feb 2023 1253 $15.66 Jan 2023 1612 $20.15 Dec 2022 1390 $17.38 Bummed by this change, I guess I'll snag the yearly plan now and see were we are 12 months from now. I don't know if kagis results are better but the experience is so much better for me and I love being able to prioritize sites I care about in results.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Karupan 4y ago
I don’t understand how they think 1000 searches per month is enough for a family. Also the cost of additional searches makes it a non starter for my family. Looks like pay per view has finally come to web searches as well.
monero-xmr 4y ago
The proper way to charge for search is free with ads with an optional premium model that promises not to data mine you or show ads. I would pay for Google search if they removed all the ads, and as a bonus aggressively de-ranked content that was primarily focused on ads rather than useful information. There will be a company that dethrones Google in search, but it might take some time
theusus 4y ago
Really disappointed with this pricing. Such pricing will kill their product and move regular consumers away from the product. I have used Brave search that gives similar search results for way less money.
- kelnos 4y ago
  And that's really the sad thing. If this pricing is too high for the business to be viable, it suggests that people would rather participate in surveillance capitalism than pay for privacy.
  - benoliver999 4y ago
    I think that's been clear since at least the early 2000s
    - palata 4y ago
      Not really fair. I think one could argue that people don't really realise the extent and impact of surveillance capitalism.
      - benoliver999 4y ago
        My experience is that once people do find out, they continue regardless.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Please explain how connecting my search queries with credit card makes me nonparticipant in surveillance capitalism?
VexorLoophole 4y ago
I understand that they may need to adjust prices, but having a search limit just feels ... bad. Imaging being on the go, trying to look something up quickly, only to be presented with the message > Search limit reached.
- boxed 4y ago
  That's not how it works. If you go over the limit you pay per search. Not totally sure that's better but still :P
  - wasabinator 4y ago
    Actually, that is how it works if you use the Pay-per-use Limit.
Youden 4y ago
I checked my usage and tend to use ~1200 searches per month. Kagi shows that of the money I spend, around 60% pays for my results, so it seems like Kagi is still profitable with the current pricing. Presumably though, they don't see this as sustainable. I wonder why? What kind of margin are they looking for here?
- akotulski 4y ago
  I think those costs take into account external API prices but not internal ones (such as employees, servers). Moreover Bing increases pricing in May for their API and I guess they are trying to factor that in as well
- Incipient 4y ago
  Bing pricing is more than doubling, so they'll be losing money on simply proxying your search requests, let alone everything else they do.
xnorswap 4y ago
Their $5 plan makes no sense. They're charging 0.015 per search when you're "over limit" but 200 searches would be $3 on "pay as you go" after your plan runs out, which is better than the bundled 200 for $5. The $10 plan is only marginally better, 700 searches (cost $10.50 PAYG) for $10.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Right, and there's a big middle ground where it doesn't make sense to upgrade to the $10 plan, even if you go over the limit of the $5 plan. I checked my usage, and it looks like at most I do around 350 searches a month. That would cost me $7.25 ($5 + 150*$0.015). It's not surprising to me that the more expensive plan is a "better deal" than the cheaper plan. But it's just weird to me that you'd have to get to 534 searches before the $10 plan makes sense, and the $10 plan only gives you another 166 searches to work with.
moltar 4y ago
What a bait and switch. Didn’t see that one coming.
- mbwgh 4y ago
  It was hinted at for a few months on the kagi discord. People could even vote for different pricing models.
  - dhbanes 4y ago
    Most people who pay for a search engine don’t participate in chat rooms discussing their paid search engine pricing.
    - gilrain 4y ago
      This will blindside Kagi if they’ve been relying on true believers in Discord for their feedback.
  - gaws 4y ago
    > It was hinted at for a few months on the kagi discord. People could even vote for different pricing models. The Discord doomers are the ones pushing for AI in search to compete and price match ChatGPT. Kagi making critical business decisions (and in the process breaking a promise for early adopters) based on feedback from a gaming chat app is another reason to stop giving them money.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I don't get why you'd consider this a "bait and switch". It seems pretty unsurprising to me that a company testing out an uncommon, unproven business model would get the pricing wrong on the first attempt. Regardless, it's not like they're the only game in town, or that you're locked in to some long-term contract with them. If you don't like the new pricing, cancel and go back to an ad-supported/data-mining-supported search engine.
  - SirensOfTitan 4y ago
benob 4y ago
I wish there was a cheaper option without the AI feature (that is probably what costs them the most).
- palata 4y ago
  That's what I thought, too, but from the blog post it feels like AI searches will "cost" a variable amount of requests. So maybe the price increase is unrelated to AI, but they market AI because people apparently love that? Not sure, and same as you: I don't want generative AI and I don't want to pay for it. I wish they made it clear that I won't have to. Also I don't want to pay for their browser that I don't use. Really I'm interested in paying the true price for my searches (instead of being tracked for ads).
nullcipher 4y ago
Not sure why they have so many tiers. After all, they have per search pricing once you hit a limit anyways. Quite confusing.
Super_Jambo 4y ago
Sounds good, at my current kagi usage I barely topped 1k search in the highest month so far. Since I'll transfer to legacy professional I'll get 1k free so that's all good. Tempting to get a 1 year sub but then the limiting of AI tools might be annoying. Hmm. Also not clear, if you hit AI tool limits on a legacy pro account can you pay per use?
villgax 4y ago
Never heard of this & I'm never going to pay for search for sure either
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I thought people hate subscription model, yet there are enough people willing to pay a monthly fee for search that is only marginally better than free product? I'm really confused. At least Adobe products etc. are actually miles ahead of alternatives.
- kelnos 4y ago
  Their target market is people who don't want ads and don't want their search behavior sold to third parties. Having better (or at least similar) search quality is certainly a requirement, but that's not really what people are paying for. Search privacy may not be something you care about, and that's fine, but it seems like Kagi may have found a market that can sustain their model.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  One of the big reasons I paid for Kagi was to support alternatives to Google. Aside from that, it was also a good search engine worth paying for.
- sph 4y ago
  We are not a hivemind, I'll have you know. And it is much better than Google Search. I don't get bombarded with ads and the results are actually relevant. Google is noticeably worse for me unless I'm searching info on local businesses.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    I just use adblock.
    - dns_snek 4y ago
      That's not really a fair comparison, ad blockers don't help with rankings. You might not see literal ads, but Google will still serve you more SEO garbage than Kagi, which is IMO better out of the box and also allows you to uprank, downrank or block certain domains from results.
- 4y ago
microtonal 4y ago
I am a Kagi subscriber and I like it a lot, but I will probably cancel after the current month. 1000 searches per month is probably enough for me, but I hate services that change the model and pricing all the time. It's just not for me. Also, I don't really care for the AI integration. I wish they'd just have kept the unlimited searches for 10 per month plan (which I don't use up anyway, so they'd make a nice profit on me) without the AI stuff. These changes also make Kagi a touch sell for friends and family. Most of them would probably do such a small number of searches that they'd be a large net profit, but the idea of having only a limited number of searches would be too off-putting for most.
- kelnos 4y ago
  > I hate services that change the model and pricing all the time It's hardly "all the time"; this is their first pricing change, no? I was a part of the free private beta, and then started paying when they started charging, and I don't recall any changes until now. It seems unsurprising that a paid search company (something that is pretty new, business-model-wise), might not get their pricing correct the first time.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    In September they said: If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#future https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#futur... So they changed the pricing terms.
- microtonal 4y ago
  Also, they broke their promise from last year, saying that they'd grandfather-in all early adopters, as long as they don't cancel: If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#future https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#futur... Now they changed it to only the current billing period.
pleb_nz 4y ago
Why do so many modern sites disable zoom in the browser? It's a real pain in the butt. Does anyone know of a workaround?
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  Found it Firefox for Android Settings > Accessibility > Zoom on all websites
knighthack 4y ago
I've been quite happy with Kagi, but I do a lot of searches throughout the day, far more than the "700 free searches per month" they offer. (Usage tells me I'm using around 1500-2000+ searches per month.) I've been on the USD10 pricing for a long time. Now it's soon to be USD25 per month for my kind of tier - which seems crazy steep, and more profiteering than an attempt to bring search to everyone.
dingleberry 4y ago
let's mapreduce search map search-term to several search engine (using curl, headless browser and whatnot) then reduce / filter the results, removing ads etc, weighing duplicates more and punish irrelevants the search-result is then piped to your favorite browser
- Diris 4y ago
  That sounds like searx[0]. [0] https://docs.searxng.org/ https://docs.searxng.org/
- dividuum 4y ago
  That exists since 1996 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
7vaS7SXdKF 4y ago
If the subscription price is not zero, the included searches are not free. In this regard, the wording of the pricing page mockup and this blog post is dishonest - or at the very least inaccurate. Not a fan of the changes otherwise. I average around 1200 searches per month which would require me to get the unlimited plan. $120/year was already a steep price compared to my other yearly subscription costs: - VPN: §50 - Broadband internet: $230 - Mobile subscription: $290 Not willing to pay more to Kagi than to my ISP and not willing to use more than one search engine.
- microtonal 4y ago
  Not a fan of the changes otherwise. I average around 1100 searches per month which would require me to get the unlimited plan. I don't like the changes either, but I don't think this is true. You could get the 1000 searches plan for $10 and then pay-per-search the additional 100 searches.
  - 7vaS7SXdKF 4y ago
    Fair, thank you for pointing that out. The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me that I just skipped over this option.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Yes, it's really weird, and I think they're going to lose a lot of customers who have the same first impression as you, that they'll have to bump up to the too-expensive plan because they're a small amount over the limit on the cheaper plan.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      > The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me That’s odd. It seems like the most natural thing ever to me.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago
shepherdjerred 4y ago
I cancelled by Kagi subscription because of this. I don't want to have to pause before I search and think "do I need to search for this? should I look through my bookmarks, notes, etc? is this worth one of the 7 searches my $5 plan will cover for the day?". I've been a frequent user of Kagi for the past ~9 months. Last month I made 1600 searches. I've even 'tipped the difference' (~$70) in the past to support Kagi. It feels gross that they're now upcharging me despite the goodwill I showed them. I know they're a business, but if you're a business, and you're not willing to respect your users, then don't ask for donations. I hope that something better than Google comes along. It was Kagi, but now it's back to the drawing board for me. My advice to Kagi: make searches cheaper. This product has no future otherwise.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  I'm afraid idea of paying for search engine has no future at all. Connecting my search queries with credit card is no option for anyone who want privacy - no matter what Vlad saying or not. Without any proof there could be only trust.
- benoliver999 4y ago
  I was finding it hard to justify the current price. This new pricing is madness to me. I think their rationale about the 'average number of searches' is misguided - what about the average number from people who are Kagi users? Those are the ones willing to pay for search, which I'd argue are currently not the 'average internet user'.
  - ac29 4y ago
    In the FAQ they they mention the average Kagi user does 700 searches a month. Perhaps uncoincidentally, the $10/month plan includes exactly that many searches.
    - sebazzz 4y ago
      I hope it will be possible to transfer unused searches from the current month to the next. If I have 400 in February and 760 in March it would be very annoying to suddenly be forced to pay or need change back to Bing.
deleted 4y ago
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_frkl 4y ago
I have to admit, I'm a bit disappointed by the mostly negative responses here, I wouldn't have thought this would be received as badly as it apparently is, by this here crowd. I haven't followed along that closely, but I dropped by their discord every once in a while, and from the discussions I saw I felt Kagi was as open as they could be, trying to communicate the upcoming change(s), why they are necessary, getting user input, changing their plans accordingly, etc. So, maybe my expectations where already 'anchored', but I find those changes very reasonable, and only if you compare it with 'free' is it expensive. But as we all know, 'free' doesn't necessarily mean no money is involved, just who pays directly and who pays indirectly. I'd guess the 'actual' cost is close to the same in both cases, minus some scaling that Google can do and Kagi can't. I'm willing to pay for 'unscaled', personally. I've been using Kagi for about a year now, averaging between 700 and 1200 searches per month, so none of the proposed plans would break the bank, compared to what I've been paying so far. Tempting to choose the legacy plan for a year, but I'll probably just go for the 'ultimate' one, the yearly plan, to support a service I really really don't want to go away. During the time I've been using Kagi, I hardly noticed it. Which I think is brilliant. There was no annoyance, in probably 90% of my searches I don't even have to scroll and one of the first 5 results is what I'm looking for. No ads, at all. In my calculations, that are at least 700 interactions with software that are fast and to the point, with very little chance to annoy me, reliably, every month. And those interactions are very important for me to do my job. I value the time and piece of mind that are connected to those 700-1200 interactions. So -- as a professional -- to me this is worth $25 a month, easily. I dislike subscriptions as much as the next person, but to me it seems obvious that the context matters here: if it's for a software, then I really want the option to pay for a permanent license, and I think it's fair to pay for (major) upgrades if I want them. Companies that lock you into their product and you can't use the data you created with it anymore -- unless you keep paying -- are acting morally reprehensible in my view. But on the other hand, if the service that is provided has a considerable cost for every user-interaction, then, well, 'pay-per-view' is justified. If I use it more, then I have to pay more. I don't want companies to make a loss because I'm using their service, esp. if I like their service. And I even want them to make a healthy surplus. A business model where heavy users pay more and are not subsidized by low-volume users seems like a good thing to me. If a search costs them, say, $0.02, then I'm happy to pay $0.04 for it, it is what it is. Of course I'd want them to be efficient, and save as much cost as one can reasonably expect (maybe some of my searches could be answered from my personal cache?), but from what I see, kagi hasn't been buying villas and yachts from my money so far, and I don't think they'll be able to in the near future with their new pricing structure. What kagi was doing here ticks all of my boxes, I don't think they have been 'baiting & switching' me, and I trust their reasoning and calculations unless someone has good evidence that shows I shouldn't.
rawoke083600 4y ago
Maybe make the pricing not how many searches, but more about latency between searches for a session:
sph 4y ago
Yikes, I understand why they're doing this, but I just learned I do about 1500 searches a month, and I'd have to upgrade to the $25/mo plan, which is a pretty steep increase. And I don't care about AI. I will probably move back to Brave Search.
LimeLimestone 4y ago
I really wish they sent an email about it. In my account settings, the option "Receive Product Updates" is turned on and in my opinion updating pricing counts as a (huge) product update. If I hadn't found this HN post, I wouldn't have been informed about any changes.
- sorwin 4y ago
  I just got the email regarding this, may take a bit I guess.
- dhbanes 4y ago
  I got my email at 11:18 PM PST. Perhaps they have determined a more optimal time to send you the email so you’d be even less likely to read it than I.
- palata 4y ago
  I did receive an e-mail.
- LimeLimestone 4y ago
  I've just got the email as well, so I guess they hadn't sent them all at once
sorwin 4y ago
With 1k-2k searches a month, $10 seemed reasonable. However, $25 does not - it's far too much of a price increase. Most people here can already get same quality results from google with an ad blocker. I get that the service costs money, but for an end user, it's not really justifiable.
- href 4y ago
  Sadly, I feel the same way. With prices going up everywhere, I have to cut some subscriptions, and Kagi will be one with this change.
xref 4y ago
So does Kagi put a date on _every_ search result ala Google? One of the reasons I finally drifted away from DDG was its very spotty displaying of the age of each result. Was constantly ending up in far outdated articles Ex searched DDG just now for “camp fire 2018” and only 1 of 10 results is dated. A lot happens in 5 years with lawsuits etc, I don’t want articles with updates from 2019! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=camp+fire+2018 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=camp+fire+2018
- dns_snek 4y ago
  I checked, about half of the search results for that query are dated.
SebastianKra 4y ago
Grandfathered subscriptions will receive 1000 free searches instead of 700, so I'm unaffected by this change. But it sours me how much money they need to throw at this. They are too dependent on external services. In my searches, nearly all results come from external indexes. Either they can't or they don't want to improve their own crawlers. Before increasing the prices, they considered disabling their most expensive search provider (I'm guessing it's Google) with catastrophic results on search quality. I was hoping that AI would level the playing field against their big competitors, but looking at their pricing chart, that won't happen either. Summarizing an article can cost up to three cents per question. I will stick around, but I don't have much hope that this business model is scalable.
rq1 4y ago
I just cancelled my plan. I found myself quoting every single keyword over the last month ala google and now the price increase? You gotta be kidding. No one asked you for your new costly features btw. People wanted a decent search engine, not a Swiss army knife.
neoberg 4y ago
I am a happy user but just checked my usage and I'll need the 25$ package - which I think is too much for search. I'm cancelling unfortunately.
- tome 4y ago
  If you switch to annual billing now then you'll get a year of the old rates for $120. That's what I just did.
  - standbythree 4y ago
    That makes sense if you are confident that they will still be in business 12 months from now. In light of these changes, and the number of people saying they will cancel, I don't share that confidence.
infinityio 4y ago
(subscriber for the past 8 months, planning to convert to annual to lock in $10/mo for the next year and reassess then) The AI tools they have been releasing are interesting, but Kagi desperately needs to decrease their average cost-per-search so that they can offer more realistic numbers of queries per month at a $10 price point. I'm not sure what the solution is - maybe generating smaller indices for particular verticals? For some classes of question (for example looking up documentation) I would expect there are a surprisingly small number of sites that consistently end up as top 3 results, and everything else can be put behind a 'load more' button that queries the paid APIs. (The problem then becomes identifying when this is the case) While it wouldn't 'fix' the cost of long tail searches, identifying 'easy' searches and answering them directly might help - looking at my own search history, I'd say maybe 1 in 3 of my queries would fall under this category.
- neysofu 4y ago
  I'll also convert to annual to get unlimited searches for a year. The search engine market is moving so fast now anyway that things may be well different a year from now.
compsciphd 4y ago
This actually could be a business model (in a very dirty way) for something that I prototyped years ago, that really didn't have a business model behind it. My thought was to make a personal search engine. i.e. it wasn't about indexing the internet (though perhaps there was value to that in combination), but to index what you've seen / your social network shares with you (easier when the APIs to said social networks were actually usable, that's sort of gone the way of the dodo). The problem is, while searching what you've seen / social network shares with you is "nice", how often are you actually going to use it? My thought was to make a browser extension that would make that passive, i.e. constantly show you what's related to the page you are looking at, from said index (using lucene's 'more like this' type search). My implementation was clean (not dirty like I said above), because it was all client side, nothing stored on any servers. A dirty business model using a similar business model to this, would be to store everything online, and charge people to search their data, but they would be giving up all their privacy to this index then (hence the dirty part). I also thought of targeted ads in the extension, but that would seemingly be a related privacy issue.
bionade24 4y ago
On 2nd march I did 105 searches and Kagi tells me it costed $1.31. I'm currently paying more than I search. Still, with the new model, I'd pay more. Guess I'll cancel my subscription, too. The lenses are still garbage too, where "wiki.*" doesn't match "wiki.domain.tld".
andrewinardeer 4y ago
Beware the Ides of March.
kmfrk 4y ago
This is a bit confusing, but the UX around is also not great. Can't we have some basic place where we can see our alotted number of searches for one, especially as it's now set to change? On top of how there's not only new and changed tiers, but also separate legacy tiers. Going through a number of clicks in Billing just to see what our search frequency was the past months is kind of a pain. Rather than having to stay up to day with news, a more intuitive interface for this would help a lot. Worst-case scenario is that loyal customers get a surprise bill next month.
Fidelix 4y ago
Simple math. It's worth it for me. I realise it's possible not many others feel the same, but even if Kagi quintupled their current prices I would still pay for it without batting an eye. Why? Because of the time and effort it saves me. I make around 1500 searches per month. If it saves me 3s per search (I'm 100% convinced it's actually way more), that's saving me 75min in a month. I'm paid more than the unlimited plan per hour. But it's hard to put a number on how much it's worth having a search tool that is algorithmically unbiased (except against ads), that actually works, and that denies big tech my data. It is true, though, that they went back on their promise to grandfather current customers. That will stay in my memory.
- gilrain 4y ago
  > algorithmically unbiased They’re adding AI, where the human biases come baked in, and charging us extra for the insult.
- xtracto 4y ago
  It is sad that you are being downvoted. The comments are generally the tipical knee jerk rage reaction HN has after they decided to feel "betrayed" by a company, and yours is one of the few not following the groupthink. I dont have anything for or against Kagi, I dont use them and don't care for them. But I see no reason to downvote your comment.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    > knee jerk rage reaction I’m not sure I’d call it a “rage reaction” to object to a 250% price increase. None of the top comments could by any stretch be described as “rage”. If you have to exaggerate to make a point you should always ask why.
    - newaccount74 4y ago
      You'd think that HN of all places would understand that a startup doesn't get pricing right on the first try.
hairofadog 4y ago
Tiny copywriting nit in case anyone from Kagi is here: > The new Standard plan pricing will be $5/month, with 200 free searches included. They’re not free; they’re $5/month. I know it sounds pedantic but on first read I thought, ok, so 200 free searches in addition to whatever you get for $5, which is… what? It makes it feel more complex than it is.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  They are "free" in the sense that any searches beyond the first 200 cost extra. They should have just said that searches beyond 200 per month cost extra.
- rurp 4y ago
  I found that part confusing. It sounds like they tried to use some non-standard language to sugarcoat a change they expect users to dislike.
- madsbuch 4y ago
  They do have team plans where each user is ~20 USD with no included searches.
SirensOfTitan 4y ago
The pricing changes are unfortunate, yes, since they encourage me to think about querying, which ought to not be the case. The more worrying update here is that Kagi is not grandfathering in legacy plans beyond the next billing cycle, which is a departure from a promise: > If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. Kagi's claim to privacy is intrinsically tied to their capacity to keep their word. If they say one thing and do another with pricing, how can I trust they'll do what they say when it comes to privacy? I paid for Kagi the first moment I was allowed to, and this news soured me on Kagi overnight. Trust is hard to earn back.
- gilrain 4y ago
  I jumped on Kagi with multiple family members due to their grandfather promise. The lie hurts all the more because they aren’t a big company. If they’re already “altering the deal”, what will they do when they’re big?
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  Agreed on both accounts. As someone who is not even a heavy user - I have over $50 in "surplus" right now, meaning they're making money off of me - I am likely to cancel for both of these exact reasons despite the fact that the actual charge to my credit card would not change next month (and I could even cut my cost in half if I wanted to).
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Agreed. I also don’t like how they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and splitting their efforts between search, a pointless new browser, and AI. It’s like Google all over again. I’m happy to give them $10 or $25 per month for excellent search and privacy. But I’m really not interested in funding their other junk.
  - wallmountedtv 4y ago
    An important tidbit from their Discord. The AI is just the commercial one from OpenAI. Paying $5 per 50 search summaries for it according to the founder of Kagi.[1] It is not in-house. 1: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/925992877602000967/1083381240155078676/image.png https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/925992877602000967/... (Backup: https://imgur.com/McoRELC https://imgur.com/McoRELC )
raiyni 4y ago
And with that pricing model, I'm out. I do well over 700 searches a month usually and it's not worth $255 annually for me to pay for a search engine. I've cross checked results when I got stuff I wasn't really expecting and it was nearly the same as google anyway.
- oidar 4y ago
  If you are already a subscriber, you get 1000 searches when the changes kick in.
user3939382 4y ago
I’ve been a huge advocate of Kagi. The $10 was a lot actually but I was willing to do it. $25, no.
hosteur 4y ago
I am a paid user of Kagi. I absolutely love the search. It is fantastic compared to Google which I have almost completely stopped using due to declining quality. I think that while the pricing is probably quite reasonable when considering the costs involved in search, Kagi is up against a mentality that web search is free. Because that has been the way it has been for all people's memory. I know it has never really been "free" because our data has been exploited by Google, and the likes. However, most people don't think that far - as is evident by the fact that Google, et al grew to the behemoths that they have become. I think they will probably need some way to ease people in to the idea of search being a paid service. Now, I live in one of the richest countries in the world, and when I pitch Kagi Seach to my friends, family and co-workers, they balk at the idea of it being a paid service. Some of these people are software engineers or IT professionals who rely heavily on search and who stands to benefit the most from the increased quality. And these are the same people who often complains about Google's declining search quality and SEO spam, etc. But still, Google is "Good Enough" and it is "free". So this is what Kagi is up against. So I think they probably need some better free tier to get people to actually experience the difference in quality. I know that the free tier is likely a huge loss leader and there is some limit to how much Kagi can provide as free. I have thought about this quite a lot since started using Kagi initially with a free tier account. My free tier account is limited to N searches per month. I run out of that number of searches in a typical workday. Problem is that I set my default search engine to Kagi on all my devices. This means that when I just type some single word just to get to a website, say, "reddit", "amazon", etc. That counts towards my limit. So that when I actually need a quality search result because I need to search for a solution to some rare error condition or similar, then I will have run out of free searches. So one idea I have thought a bit about is: not all searches are equal. This goes both for the value of the search result for the user as well as the cost of executing the search query. Some common terms like one word queries such as "facebook", "amazon", "apple", etc. would likely be trivial to cache and thus not cost as complex queries that are also likely unique. I think they should consider making non-unique, one word searches does not count towards the limit. And I would also strongly consider not having such queries require a login. The reason being that this would let many more people get started with Kagi. And also, if I am to pay even a single cent for a search that is trivial, I would go out of my way to ensure that Kagi is not a default search engine on any devices and I would try my search on one of the other engines first. Even if the cost is trivial - but it is still there and it is something I am conscious about. And what is worse: I now have a variable cost I need to worry about... Also, I think they really need to get companies on board for this. But most companies have very strict policies regarding recurring fees. That is, until the mentality around search being free changes... And solving that will likely require investing a lot in giving free searches away. It's a marketing cost. And people really need to experience how the quality and experience of search can be better than Google. Because even though Google sucks most people have a hard time envisioning what an alternative would look like.
mberning 4y ago
Sad to see this. I just cancelled my plan. To stay on an unlimited plan is over a 100% increase in price and that's just unacceptable to me.
pwpw 4y ago
A few things rub me the wrong way about this article: - I didn’t receive an email clearly indicating the pricing changes and pointing to this article. Instead, I found it on hacker news. - Every paid tier refers to the number of searches it allows as “free” despite requiring payment. - The wording around existing customers led to me believing that the pricing won’t change until cancelling the current plan (grandfathering). However, once I came to these comments I learned that pricing goes away at the end of the billing cycle and will be switched to a new plan. - Their words about average internet users’ number of searches feel so disconnected from who their actual users are and is incorrectly framing the conversation. If their goal is to truly expand to being the search that everyone uses, requiring payment will never allow that to happen. I wish they had invested in building their own crawlers rather than AI and their Kagi browser.
- geoah 4y ago
  Crawlers over ai would be nice indeed.
osculum 4y ago
The more disappointing part for me is that they didn’t keep the promise of grandfathering plans. I’ve lost confidence in them and will most likely cancel my subscription. Luckily search is mostly fungible.
karaterobot 4y ago
I only use about 350-450 searches a month at present, so this pricing change won't affect me. However, I've not been crazy about Kagi's search quality lately, and I'm not convinced that more deeply integrating AI into the results will solve that. I'd rather the roughly 55% of my unused subscription went to improving the core product, but I'm not going to cancel yet because Kagi still provides the value of being comparatively confidential with my data. (When it is revealed — as the narrative of this story demands it must be — that they sell you to advertisers like everybody else, I won't be surprised but I will be disappointed) Every search engine seems to be scrambling to throw AI at their product: is it because they've thoroughly tested it, and it definitely improves the results? Or is it because it's a bullet point in the feature list? Feels like there is potential, but it also feels like a gold rush too, so I'm sort of waiting skeptically to see how it will shake out.
osculum 4y ago
The most disappointing part for me is that they didn’t keep the promise of grandfathering plans. I’ve lost confidence in them and will most likely cancel my subscription. Luckily search is mostly fungible.
O-stevns 4y ago
I'm definitely a part of the outliers in those statistics given my monthly use varies.. sometime 800, other times +1200 queries. The pricing seems reasonable to me although I do not see myself paying 25 bucks for unlimited search. I'll probably stay on the 1000 queries and see where it takes me... The fact that you'll pay per queue once you hit the limit seems to have been missed by some in the thread... You do not have to upgrade to $25 unless the cost of per queue ends up being more expensive than the tier. Additionally you can set a soft and hard limit and although it's of course more expensive than the current unlimited plan, it's imo still better than the alternatives. One thing is for sure, I can't go back to Google, DDG or bing, Kagi is just so much better.
jareklupinski 4y ago
I personally don't care about AI generated summaries or anything else that 'enhances the search experience'; can I get a plan that doesn't use those flows and saves you money? All I ever wanted was to quickly find the source for a tidbit of information I know exists somewhere; I'll draw my own conclusions based on the source The only reason I switched from Google was because Kagi presented me with what I wanted on page one vs. having to waste time navigating to page two or three of Google results But over the past few weeks, the blogspam is back, and my reporting seems to do nothing...
thiht 4y ago
I for one don't mind too much this new pricing. I'm not ready to spend $10/mo in a search engine subscription, but $5/mo hits the spot for me. The only thing I'm not sure is if 200 searches per month is enough, I have no idea how many searches I do but 200 sounds pretty low. 1 search often ends up being 10 searches when you need to tweak the keywords or the quotes.
10729287 4y ago
One question I ask myself. Does the dependency to Google and Bing APIs been advertised before today ? Can't remember reading that and was genuinely thinking everything was baked in-house (yes I was naive.)
- cooperadymas 4y ago
  Yes, it is not something they hide. This has been discussed every time Kagi comes up, so I'd say it's fairly well known, at least in places where Kagi is known. It is documented plainly in their help text and archive.org has indexed that page as far back as October. https://web.archive.org/web/20221025065617/https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221025065617/https://help.kagi...
  - 10729287 4y ago
    Thank you for your documented answer !
sb057 4y ago
>the $10 per month unlimited search plan was not financially sustainable for us The correct response to realizing your business model is unsustainable is not to double down on it.
pkulak 4y ago
What I don't understand is this idea that searches cost them 1.2 cents each. 1.2 cents is the cost of operating a 4-core, 16-gig, 5-gigabit server on AWS for nearly 5 minutes. If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. Only thing I can think of, is that they have divided their entire operating costs by number of searches a day, and 1.2 cents is not really the marginal cost of a new search, which is _super_ dishonest.
- sdfhbdf 4y ago
  It's Bing API usage cost as they mentioned, and Bing hiked the prices up 100%, as they mentioned. Most of their searches are combining data from Bing, Google and other sources. They never stated that this cost is their infrastructure cost.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. You don't believe that Google is spending at least $44 million a day on providing search?
COGlory 4y ago
The core of a search product is that I want to be able to search. I don't want AI. I don't want a web browser that only works on Mac. I don't want metered searches. I wouldn't mind spending more money if it helped them develop their own scraping and be a viable alternative to Google in the future. But there's no indication they are making the business choices necessary to do that. Additionally, they said they would grandfather in old users, which they did not. I'd been subscribed for a while, but I just canceled my subscription. So disappointed.
synctheship 4y ago
I was a paying kagi subscriber for about 5-6 months before canceling my subscription. Before that I participated in the beta, and was very excited in Kagi's mission. The service did provide better search results for me than google or bing, partly due to no ads and my ability to better filter out blog spam. I legitimately enjoyed using the service, but in the end could not rationalize paying $120 a year for search. That's more than I pay all in for email, VPN, online storage, password manager, etc. I was really hoping they'd work on their own indexing and decreasing their costs. For simple, good, reliable, no advertising search I'd happily pay $5-7.50 for. I recently had a thought about re-subscribing when I got this email last night, and this pricing model is not appetizing at all. Not a fan of metering or search limits, I tried using their free plan but having to spend even a .25 of second to think if I want to use up 1 of my valuable search credits ruins the whole experience for me. In the 6 months since I unsubscribed their pricing has gone up and they are tacking on AI which they are just leveraging openai for? I'm disappointed to say the least.
mathgorges 4y ago
I'm switching my monthly plan to annual today. My read of the announcment is that this will grandfather me into unlimited search for the year, while excluding me from any of the new AI enhancments. I hope this clearly conveys my opinion on this change to whomever is bean counting :)
rurp 4y ago
I bookmarked Kagi a while back and have been using it occasionally as a failover when other search engines fail me, wondering if it would be good enough to stick as a daily driver. So far it hasn't really stood out to me but has been decent enough to keep trying. Maybe the searches I have tried so far aren't areas that it excels at? Whelp, after these account changes I won't find out. I absolutely don't want to have to think about metering my search queries per day and would bet that the vast majority of users feel the same. Hopefully Kagi can figure out a way to control their costs better and/or figure out a more accessible revenue strategy. Avoiding piling on the latest AI hype would be a good start...
dave_walko 4y ago
I am sorry, I said this when they first went pay. Vlad does not seem like a nice guy. My emails that I have exchanged with him have been very short and to the point of "he is better and knows better". I do not pay for their service due to this as well as I do not see the value. I didn't see the value with their old model, and see the value even less now. I give them another year or 2 and they will be a relic of the past. This price hike and the broken promises are a clear indication they are struggling. Welcome to the deep end of the pool, how long can you tread water?
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  >I didn't see the value with their old model, and see the value even less now. I do see the value and would be happy to pay for the $25/month unlimited plan. Search and AI are the largest boons to my productivity by a long shot. $25/month is nothing when the alternatives (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) all suck. If it was $25/day I would start to question the pricing.
  - dave_walko 4y ago
    While I value your thoughts, judging by the other comments on here, you are in the minority. I REALLY did/do want to like them and their product. Being on a Mac, I have tested both their standard and beta browser. It is decent. However, after seeing Kagi go from free to paid and now being even more, I see the same happening with their browser down the road. I just do not want to invest my time into an experiment only to be treated the way they have to their users. It is just shady.
doesnt_know 4y ago
I've been a happy user since December, but I knew this change would eventually come. On the existing $10 USD a month plan I've been scraping under the "break even" usage point and I've only used it on my personal devices/outside of work. Still using google for my day job since I figure it would tip me way over the point where it would be sustainable. Sort of justified it to myself that it's technically "my employers" privacy since I'm googling things related to developing their product and nothing to do with me personally. In saying that I thought/hoped they would put in a huge drive to try and minimize the cost of search over time, not just rely on bumping up end user pricing. I don't think I can justify the price of the unlimited plan, which is what I would need if I actually used it on all my devices. That would be $40 NZD a month! For context that's more then I pay for Netflix, Disney+ and Crunchyroll combined.
krystofbe 4y ago
I switched from Kagi back to Google because Kagi was just too slow for me. The search results on Google load much faster, while the response time on Kagi was at times over 500 miliseconds.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Why not SearX, You.com, Startpage, Neeva, etc?
meatjuice 4y ago
Apparently they're struggling gathering money. It's not hard to imagine though.
runxel 4y ago
Too bad they decided to become irrelevant. Kagi was a fresh breeze and liked it very much, but by abolishing the free plan (which is now a merely short trial) and rising the prices this steeply will hurt them. It's so much eyebrow-raising, too! All I wanted is a good search, but now they try to justify by saying "oh no our shiny AI costs so much!" – a feature I did not want and neither intend to use! Same with their browser? Why is everybody so fixated in making their own? It is maddening. I recommended Kagi to all my colleagues and friends. Will stop doing that.
madsbuch 4y ago
The pricing at 10$ a month (paid as 120$ a month) was for me already too steep. But I could justify a subscription last june because of 3 reasons: 1. Philosophically: I want to pay for things I use 2. Quality: They do provide the best results 3. Experimentation: I want to try out new things The new pricing scheme has forced me to abandon it. When my current subscription stops in june it is back to Google.
kid64 4y ago
Wondering what kind of legal exposure Kagi has here? In the United States, selling something under false pretenses (like the promise of grandfathered pricing) is fraud.
mordae 4y ago
Yeah, I will probably subscribe as they introduce the family mode. Quality of the results is way better than Google and derivatives. I can once again find small blogs, various fora etc. with genuine people discussing their first-hand experience instead of generic ad farms.

204 points by exists 4y ago

Yep, that's it for me. A loyal, paying customer all the way from beta days doesn't seem to matter much. I truly hoped they would have kept their word and grandfathered the old subscriptions. Burning your money on the AI and browser nonesense is on you. Don't count me in.

kervantas 4y ago

I tried it out today for a full day to see whether I should quickly subscribe to get the legacy professional benefits. I found having a limit on the number of allowed searches really uncomfortable. So it is a nope for me at this price. Also, the search engine market is really heating up. We have - Bing with a GPT chatbot - Brave Search with lenses, similar to Kagi - DuckDuckGo with a limited chatbot - Swurl is cool as well (but I think that is just a frontend for Google) ...and they are all free to use. I am not sure if Kagi will survive another year with this business model. IMO, they should focus on freeing themselves from Bing's API and build their own indexes to drive down costs, and also drop anything AI related gimmick, and embrace the UNIX philosophy: do one ting well.

zapatos 4y ago

> It used to be 1.25 cents per search. Microsoft recently increased Bing search results API cost to 2.8 cents per search I guess Microsoft decided to switch their strategy from "help startups take market share from Google" to "kill the competition and try to get users to search on Bing"?

aix1 4y ago

I just read the update and my first reaction is that the pricing structure seems fairly complicated.

aorth 4y ago
Enthusiastic paying Kagi user here and I felt the same. What helped is to find the "Usage" section of my account (under the Billing section) to see how many searches I've been doing in past months. In March, so far, I've done 180. I wonder if they count "!g" searches? I don't use this often, but I'm curious. We are all waking up to realize what it takes to run a profitable search company without ads and surveillance capitalism. I am genuinely happy with Kagi's service, but I am confident that less-technical users would rather just keep using "free" search like Google, Bing, etc. The vast majority of users just don't know or care about privacy, and even if they do, the vast majority of people in the world aren't going to pay for search!
- aix1 4y ago
  I read in the FAQ that "bang" searches (e.g. !g) don't count towards usage.

jszymborski 4y ago

Kagi is a bit of a HN darling so I know I'm putting my neck out here, but even after trying the trial, I'm not sure what the value prop is. I would happily pay for a search engine that provided good results, but seeing as it's ostensibly Just Bing under the hood, I'm not sure what I get that I'm not getting from DDG or MetaGer + an ad blocker. Kagi doesn't strike me as a privacy alternative given that all my searches are necessarily tied to a user id which is further tied to a payment method. Finally, the metered usage feels far too much like an ancient cell phone plan. I really hate the idea of me paying for search only to have to switch to actual Bing when I hit some limit. I like what Kagi is trying to do, but I don't see it as either sustainable or awfully useful unless such a service owns its index. Feel free to let me know what I missed, I'm sure Kagi's paying customers are paying for a reason!

sshine 4y ago
I’m a paying customer. I pay mainly as an experiment to figure out what my searches actually cost. If those costs are covered by advertisers that I block, my free search experience is paid for by people who don’t block those ads. I don’t like that thought. I may go back to DDG if the new payment structure is insufficient (I don’t know if I search more than 1.000 times a month). But it is somewhat eye-opening how much I take search for granted.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If you click into your kagi billing, there is a usage dashboard. I thought I'd be fine with the 700 searches a month.. but my average is 1600. $300/year for a search engine is probably more than I am willing to pay, especially for an individual subscription.
rippercushions 4y ago
I used to use DDG, but the search results were so bad that I had to !g all the time. With Kagi, the results (which are mixed from various services, not just Bing) are actively superior to Google (so much less spam!) almost all the time, and the only Google search service I still use regularly is Maps. That said, while I've been happily paying $10/mo for the pro plan for a while, I'm not convinced the 1000 searches/mo will suffice. Guess I'll find out soon enough. Update: I checked https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption and to my surprise I'm averaging under 20 searches a day total, even though Kagi is my main search engine on both mobile and desktop. So looks like I'll be OK after all.

nifoc 4y ago

I'm a happy Kagi customer, but going from $10/mo to $25/mo seems like a very steep increase. (I realize that much of it is probably driven by Bing more than doubling the price for their API results.) One thing that feels kind of disingenuous to me is the number of searches that "a normal user" does in a month. The blog post mentions it several times, but they always reference numbers provided by Google or DDG. I have a feeling that the numbers for their "tech-savvy and heavy users of search" are _way_ higher than the averages of Google and DDG. At my current usage, I would have to go with the $25/mo plan once my current subscription is up.

epups 4y ago

> Q. Where does the search usage data (99% of users search less than 200 times a month) come from? A. The average person searches Google three or four times per day. (90-120 times per month)(...) According to DuckDuckGo’s data, the monthly average is about 30 searches per person or one per day. The average does not imply anything about a distribution, and the links provided do not back up this claim at all. Furthermore, Kagi's target audience is not composed of average users. I find it quite misleading because Kagi could provide data from its own user base to answer this question.

raybb 4y ago

Here are my search counts and costs to Kagi for the recent months as a student, mostly traveling in Feb. Feb 2023 1253 $15.66 Jan 2023 1612 $20.15 Dec 2022 1390 $17.38 Bummed by this change, I guess I'll snag the yearly plan now and see were we are 12 months from now. I don't know if kagis results are better but the experience is so much better for me and I love being able to prioritize sites I care about in results.

deleted 4y ago
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Karupan 4y ago

I don’t understand how they think 1000 searches per month is enough for a family. Also the cost of additional searches makes it a non starter for my family. Looks like pay per view has finally come to web searches as well.

monero-xmr 4y ago

The proper way to charge for search is free with ads with an optional premium model that promises not to data mine you or show ads. I would pay for Google search if they removed all the ads, and as a bonus aggressively de-ranked content that was primarily focused on ads rather than useful information. There will be a company that dethrones Google in search, but it might take some time

theusus 4y ago

Really disappointed with this pricing. Such pricing will kill their product and move regular consumers away from the product. I have used Brave search that gives similar search results for way less money.

kelnos 4y ago
And that's really the sad thing. If this pricing is too high for the business to be viable, it suggests that people would rather participate in surveillance capitalism than pay for privacy.
- benoliver999 4y ago
  I think that's been clear since at least the early 2000s
  - palata 4y ago
    Not really fair. I think one could argue that people don't really realise the extent and impact of surveillance capitalism.
    - benoliver999 4y ago
      My experience is that once people do find out, they continue regardless.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Please explain how connecting my search queries with credit card makes me nonparticipant in surveillance capitalism?

VexorLoophole 4y ago

I understand that they may need to adjust prices, but having a search limit just feels ... bad. Imaging being on the go, trying to look something up quickly, only to be presented with the message > Search limit reached.

boxed 4y ago
That's not how it works. If you go over the limit you pay per search. Not totally sure that's better but still :P
- wasabinator 4y ago
  Actually, that is how it works if you use the Pay-per-use Limit.

Youden 4y ago

I checked my usage and tend to use ~1200 searches per month. Kagi shows that of the money I spend, around 60% pays for my results, so it seems like Kagi is still profitable with the current pricing. Presumably though, they don't see this as sustainable. I wonder why? What kind of margin are they looking for here?

akotulski 4y ago
I think those costs take into account external API prices but not internal ones (such as employees, servers). Moreover Bing increases pricing in May for their API and I guess they are trying to factor that in as well
Incipient 4y ago
Bing pricing is more than doubling, so they'll be losing money on simply proxying your search requests, let alone everything else they do.

xnorswap 4y ago

Their $5 plan makes no sense. They're charging 0.015 per search when you're "over limit" but 200 searches would be $3 on "pay as you go" after your plan runs out, which is better than the bundled 200 for $5. The $10 plan is only marginally better, 700 searches (cost $10.50 PAYG) for $10.

kelnos 4y ago
Right, and there's a big middle ground where it doesn't make sense to upgrade to the $10 plan, even if you go over the limit of the $5 plan. I checked my usage, and it looks like at most I do around 350 searches a month. That would cost me $7.25 ($5 + 150*$0.015). It's not surprising to me that the more expensive plan is a "better deal" than the cheaper plan. But it's just weird to me that you'd have to get to 534 searches before the $10 plan makes sense, and the $10 plan only gives you another 166 searches to work with.

moltar 4y ago

What a bait and switch. Didn’t see that one coming.

mbwgh 4y ago
It was hinted at for a few months on the kagi discord. People could even vote for different pricing models.
- dhbanes 4y ago
  Most people who pay for a search engine don’t participate in chat rooms discussing their paid search engine pricing.
  - gilrain 4y ago
    This will blindside Kagi if they’ve been relying on true believers in Discord for their feedback.
- gaws 4y ago
  > It was hinted at for a few months on the kagi discord. People could even vote for different pricing models. The Discord doomers are the ones pushing for AI in search to compete and price match ChatGPT. Kagi making critical business decisions (and in the process breaking a promise for early adopters) based on feedback from a gaming chat app is another reason to stop giving them money.
kelnos 4y ago
I don't get why you'd consider this a "bait and switch". It seems pretty unsurprising to me that a company testing out an uncommon, unproven business model would get the pricing wrong on the first attempt. Regardless, it's not like they're the only game in town, or that you're locked in to some long-term contract with them. If you don't like the new pricing, cancel and go back to an ad-supported/data-mining-supported search engine.
- SirensOfTitan 4y ago

benob 4y ago

I wish there was a cheaper option without the AI feature (that is probably what costs them the most).

palata 4y ago
That's what I thought, too, but from the blog post it feels like AI searches will "cost" a variable amount of requests. So maybe the price increase is unrelated to AI, but they market AI because people apparently love that? Not sure, and same as you: I don't want generative AI and I don't want to pay for it. I wish they made it clear that I won't have to. Also I don't want to pay for their browser that I don't use. Really I'm interested in paying the true price for my searches (instead of being tracked for ads).

nullcipher 4y ago

Not sure why they have so many tiers. After all, they have per search pricing once you hit a limit anyways. Quite confusing.

Super_Jambo 4y ago

Sounds good, at my current kagi usage I barely topped 1k search in the highest month so far. Since I'll transfer to legacy professional I'll get 1k free so that's all good. Tempting to get a 1 year sub but then the limiting of AI tools might be annoying. Hmm. Also not clear, if you hit AI tool limits on a legacy pro account can you pay per use?

villgax 4y ago

Never heard of this & I'm never going to pay for search for sure either

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I thought people hate subscription model, yet there are enough people willing to pay a monthly fee for search that is only marginally better than free product? I'm really confused. At least Adobe products etc. are actually miles ahead of alternatives.

kelnos 4y ago
Their target market is people who don't want ads and don't want their search behavior sold to third parties. Having better (or at least similar) search quality is certainly a requirement, but that's not really what people are paying for. Search privacy may not be something you care about, and that's fine, but it seems like Kagi may have found a market that can sustain their model.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
One of the big reasons I paid for Kagi was to support alternatives to Google. Aside from that, it was also a good search engine worth paying for.
sph 4y ago
We are not a hivemind, I'll have you know. And it is much better than Google Search. I don't get bombarded with ads and the results are actually relevant. Google is noticeably worse for me unless I'm searching info on local businesses.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I just use adblock.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    That's not really a fair comparison, ad blockers don't help with rankings. You might not see literal ads, but Google will still serve you more SEO garbage than Kagi, which is IMO better out of the box and also allows you to uprank, downrank or block certain domains from results.
4y ago

microtonal 4y ago

I am a Kagi subscriber and I like it a lot, but I will probably cancel after the current month. 1000 searches per month is probably enough for me, but I hate services that change the model and pricing all the time. It's just not for me. Also, I don't really care for the AI integration. I wish they'd just have kept the unlimited searches for 10 per month plan (which I don't use up anyway, so they'd make a nice profit on me) without the AI stuff. These changes also make Kagi a touch sell for friends and family. Most of them would probably do such a small number of searches that they'd be a large net profit, but the idea of having only a limited number of searches would be too off-putting for most.

kelnos 4y ago
> I hate services that change the model and pricing all the time It's hardly "all the time"; this is their first pricing change, no? I was a part of the free private beta, and then started paying when they started charging, and I don't recall any changes until now. It seems unsurprising that a paid search company (something that is pretty new, business-model-wise), might not get their pricing correct the first time.
- microtonal 4y ago
  In September they said: If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#future https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#futur... So they changed the pricing terms.
microtonal 4y ago
Also, they broke their promise from last year, saying that they'd grandfather-in all early adopters, as long as they don't cancel: If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#future https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#futur... Now they changed it to only the current billing period.

pleb_nz 4y ago

Why do so many modern sites disable zoom in the browser? It's a real pain in the butt. Does anyone know of a workaround?

pleb_nz 4y ago
Found it Firefox for Android Settings > Accessibility > Zoom on all websites

knighthack 4y ago

I've been quite happy with Kagi, but I do a lot of searches throughout the day, far more than the "700 free searches per month" they offer. (Usage tells me I'm using around 1500-2000+ searches per month.) I've been on the USD10 pricing for a long time. Now it's soon to be USD25 per month for my kind of tier - which seems crazy steep, and more profiteering than an attempt to bring search to everyone.

dingleberry 4y ago

let's mapreduce search map search-term to several search engine (using curl, headless browser and whatnot) then reduce / filter the results, removing ads etc, weighing duplicates more and punish irrelevants the search-result is then piped to your favorite browser

Diris 4y ago
That sounds like searx[0]. [0] https://docs.searxng.org/ https://docs.searxng.org/
dividuum 4y ago
That exists since 1996 :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer

7vaS7SXdKF 4y ago

If the subscription price is not zero, the included searches are not free. In this regard, the wording of the pricing page mockup and this blog post is dishonest - or at the very least inaccurate. Not a fan of the changes otherwise. I average around 1200 searches per month which would require me to get the unlimited plan. $120/year was already a steep price compared to my other yearly subscription costs: - VPN: §50 - Broadband internet: $230 - Mobile subscription: $290 Not willing to pay more to Kagi than to my ISP and not willing to use more than one search engine.

microtonal 4y ago
Not a fan of the changes otherwise. I average around 1100 searches per month which would require me to get the unlimited plan. I don't like the changes either, but I don't think this is true. You could get the 1000 searches plan for $10 and then pay-per-search the additional 100 searches.
- 7vaS7SXdKF 4y ago
  Fair, thank you for pointing that out. The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me that I just skipped over this option.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Yes, it's really weird, and I think they're going to lose a lot of customers who have the same first impression as you, that they'll have to bump up to the too-expensive plan because they're a small amount over the limit on the cheaper plan.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me That’s odd. It seems like the most natural thing ever to me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
4y ago

shepherdjerred 4y ago

I cancelled by Kagi subscription because of this. I don't want to have to pause before I search and think "do I need to search for this? should I look through my bookmarks, notes, etc? is this worth one of the 7 searches my $5 plan will cover for the day?". I've been a frequent user of Kagi for the past ~9 months. Last month I made 1600 searches. I've even 'tipped the difference' (~$70) in the past to support Kagi. It feels gross that they're now upcharging me despite the goodwill I showed them. I know they're a business, but if you're a business, and you're not willing to respect your users, then don't ask for donations. I hope that something better than Google comes along. It was Kagi, but now it's back to the drawing board for me. My advice to Kagi: make searches cheaper. This product has no future otherwise.

t0bia_s 4y ago
I'm afraid idea of paying for search engine has no future at all. Connecting my search queries with credit card is no option for anyone who want privacy - no matter what Vlad saying or not. Without any proof there could be only trust.
benoliver999 4y ago
I was finding it hard to justify the current price. This new pricing is madness to me. I think their rationale about the 'average number of searches' is misguided - what about the average number from people who are Kagi users? Those are the ones willing to pay for search, which I'd argue are currently not the 'average internet user'.
- ac29 4y ago
  In the FAQ they they mention the average Kagi user does 700 searches a month. Perhaps uncoincidentally, the $10/month plan includes exactly that many searches.
  - sebazzz 4y ago
    I hope it will be possible to transfer unused searches from the current month to the next. If I have 400 in February and 760 in March it would be very annoying to suddenly be forced to pay or need change back to Bing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_frkl 4y ago

I have to admit, I'm a bit disappointed by the mostly negative responses here, I wouldn't have thought this would be received as badly as it apparently is, by this here crowd. I haven't followed along that closely, but I dropped by their discord every once in a while, and from the discussions I saw I felt Kagi was as open as they could be, trying to communicate the upcoming change(s), why they are necessary, getting user input, changing their plans accordingly, etc. So, maybe my expectations where already 'anchored', but I find those changes very reasonable, and only if you compare it with 'free' is it expensive. But as we all know, 'free' doesn't necessarily mean no money is involved, just who pays directly and who pays indirectly. I'd guess the 'actual' cost is close to the same in both cases, minus some scaling that Google can do and Kagi can't. I'm willing to pay for 'unscaled', personally. I've been using Kagi for about a year now, averaging between 700 and 1200 searches per month, so none of the proposed plans would break the bank, compared to what I've been paying so far. Tempting to choose the legacy plan for a year, but I'll probably just go for the 'ultimate' one, the yearly plan, to support a service I really really don't want to go away. During the time I've been using Kagi, I hardly noticed it. Which I think is brilliant. There was no annoyance, in probably 90% of my searches I don't even have to scroll and one of the first 5 results is what I'm looking for. No ads, at all. In my calculations, that are at least 700 interactions with software that are fast and to the point, with very little chance to annoy me, reliably, every month. And those interactions are very important for me to do my job. I value the time and piece of mind that are connected to those 700-1200 interactions. So -- as a professional -- to me this is worth $25 a month, easily. I dislike subscriptions as much as the next person, but to me it seems obvious that the context matters here: if it's for a software, then I really want the option to pay for a permanent license, and I think it's fair to pay for (major) upgrades if I want them. Companies that lock you into their product and you can't use the data you created with it anymore -- unless you keep paying -- are acting morally reprehensible in my view. But on the other hand, if the service that is provided has a considerable cost for every user-interaction, then, well, 'pay-per-view' is justified. If I use it more, then I have to pay more. I don't want companies to make a loss because I'm using their service, esp. if I like their service. And I even want them to make a healthy surplus. A business model where heavy users pay more and are not subsidized by low-volume users seems like a good thing to me. If a search costs them, say, $0.02, then I'm happy to pay $0.04 for it, it is what it is. Of course I'd want them to be efficient, and save as much cost as one can reasonably expect (maybe some of my searches could be answered from my personal cache?), but from what I see, kagi hasn't been buying villas and yachts from my money so far, and I don't think they'll be able to in the near future with their new pricing structure. What kagi was doing here ticks all of my boxes, I don't think they have been 'baiting & switching' me, and I trust their reasoning and calculations unless someone has good evidence that shows I shouldn't.

rawoke083600 4y ago

Maybe make the pricing not how many searches, but more about latency between searches for a session:

sph 4y ago

Yikes, I understand why they're doing this, but I just learned I do about 1500 searches a month, and I'd have to upgrade to the $25/mo plan, which is a pretty steep increase. And I don't care about AI. I will probably move back to Brave Search.

LimeLimestone 4y ago

I really wish they sent an email about it. In my account settings, the option "Receive Product Updates" is turned on and in my opinion updating pricing counts as a (huge) product update. If I hadn't found this HN post, I wouldn't have been informed about any changes.

sorwin 4y ago
I just got the email regarding this, may take a bit I guess.
dhbanes 4y ago
I got my email at 11:18 PM PST. Perhaps they have determined a more optimal time to send you the email so you’d be even less likely to read it than I.
palata 4y ago
I did receive an e-mail.
LimeLimestone 4y ago
I've just got the email as well, so I guess they hadn't sent them all at once

sorwin 4y ago

With 1k-2k searches a month, $10 seemed reasonable. However, $25 does not - it's far too much of a price increase. Most people here can already get same quality results from google with an ad blocker. I get that the service costs money, but for an end user, it's not really justifiable.

href 4y ago
Sadly, I feel the same way. With prices going up everywhere, I have to cut some subscriptions, and Kagi will be one with this change.

xref 4y ago

So does Kagi put a date on _every_ search result ala Google? One of the reasons I finally drifted away from DDG was its very spotty displaying of the age of each result. Was constantly ending up in far outdated articles Ex searched DDG just now for “camp fire 2018” and only 1 of 10 results is dated. A lot happens in 5 years with lawsuits etc, I don’t want articles with updates from 2019! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=camp+fire+2018 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=camp+fire+2018

dns_snek 4y ago
I checked, about half of the search results for that query are dated.

SebastianKra 4y ago

Grandfathered subscriptions will receive 1000 free searches instead of 700, so I'm unaffected by this change. But it sours me how much money they need to throw at this. They are too dependent on external services. In my searches, nearly all results come from external indexes. Either they can't or they don't want to improve their own crawlers. Before increasing the prices, they considered disabling their most expensive search provider (I'm guessing it's Google) with catastrophic results on search quality. I was hoping that AI would level the playing field against their big competitors, but looking at their pricing chart, that won't happen either. Summarizing an article can cost up to three cents per question. I will stick around, but I don't have much hope that this business model is scalable.

rq1 4y ago

I just cancelled my plan. I found myself quoting every single keyword over the last month ala google and now the price increase? You gotta be kidding. No one asked you for your new costly features btw. People wanted a decent search engine, not a Swiss army knife.

neoberg 4y ago

I am a happy user but just checked my usage and I'll need the 25$ package - which I think is too much for search. I'm cancelling unfortunately.

tome 4y ago
If you switch to annual billing now then you'll get a year of the old rates for $120. That's what I just did.
- standbythree 4y ago
  That makes sense if you are confident that they will still be in business 12 months from now. In light of these changes, and the number of people saying they will cancel, I don't share that confidence.

infinityio 4y ago

(subscriber for the past 8 months, planning to convert to annual to lock in $10/mo for the next year and reassess then) The AI tools they have been releasing are interesting, but Kagi desperately needs to decrease their average cost-per-search so that they can offer more realistic numbers of queries per month at a $10 price point. I'm not sure what the solution is - maybe generating smaller indices for particular verticals? For some classes of question (for example looking up documentation) I would expect there are a surprisingly small number of sites that consistently end up as top 3 results, and everything else can be put behind a 'load more' button that queries the paid APIs. (The problem then becomes identifying when this is the case) While it wouldn't 'fix' the cost of long tail searches, identifying 'easy' searches and answering them directly might help - looking at my own search history, I'd say maybe 1 in 3 of my queries would fall under this category.

neysofu 4y ago
I'll also convert to annual to get unlimited searches for a year. The search engine market is moving so fast now anyway that things may be well different a year from now.

compsciphd 4y ago

This actually could be a business model (in a very dirty way) for something that I prototyped years ago, that really didn't have a business model behind it. My thought was to make a personal search engine. i.e. it wasn't about indexing the internet (though perhaps there was value to that in combination), but to index what you've seen / your social network shares with you (easier when the APIs to said social networks were actually usable, that's sort of gone the way of the dodo). The problem is, while searching what you've seen / social network shares with you is "nice", how often are you actually going to use it? My thought was to make a browser extension that would make that passive, i.e. constantly show you what's related to the page you are looking at, from said index (using lucene's 'more like this' type search). My implementation was clean (not dirty like I said above), because it was all client side, nothing stored on any servers. A dirty business model using a similar business model to this, would be to store everything online, and charge people to search their data, but they would be giving up all their privacy to this index then (hence the dirty part). I also thought of targeted ads in the extension, but that would seemingly be a related privacy issue.

bionade24 4y ago

On 2nd march I did 105 searches and Kagi tells me it costed $1.31. I'm currently paying more than I search. Still, with the new model, I'd pay more. Guess I'll cancel my subscription, too. The lenses are still garbage too, where "wiki.*" doesn't match "wiki.domain.tld".

andrewinardeer 4y ago

Beware the Ides of March.

kmfrk 4y ago

This is a bit confusing, but the UX around is also not great. Can't we have some basic place where we can see our alotted number of searches for one, especially as it's now set to change? On top of how there's not only new and changed tiers, but also separate legacy tiers. Going through a number of clicks in Billing just to see what our search frequency was the past months is kind of a pain. Rather than having to stay up to day with news, a more intuitive interface for this would help a lot. Worst-case scenario is that loyal customers get a surprise bill next month.

Fidelix 4y ago

Simple math. It's worth it for me. I realise it's possible not many others feel the same, but even if Kagi quintupled their current prices I would still pay for it without batting an eye. Why? Because of the time and effort it saves me. I make around 1500 searches per month. If it saves me 3s per search (I'm 100% convinced it's actually way more), that's saving me 75min in a month. I'm paid more than the unlimited plan per hour. But it's hard to put a number on how much it's worth having a search tool that is algorithmically unbiased (except against ads), that actually works, and that denies big tech my data. It is true, though, that they went back on their promise to grandfather current customers. That will stay in my memory.

gilrain 4y ago
> algorithmically unbiased They’re adding AI, where the human biases come baked in, and charging us extra for the insult.
xtracto 4y ago
It is sad that you are being downvoted. The comments are generally the tipical knee jerk rage reaction HN has after they decided to feel "betrayed" by a company, and yours is one of the few not following the groupthink. I dont have anything for or against Kagi, I dont use them and don't care for them. But I see no reason to downvote your comment.
- user3939382 4y ago
  > knee jerk rage reaction I’m not sure I’d call it a “rage reaction” to object to a 250% price increase. None of the top comments could by any stretch be described as “rage”. If you have to exaggerate to make a point you should always ask why.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    You'd think that HN of all places would understand that a startup doesn't get pricing right on the first try.

hairofadog 4y ago

Tiny copywriting nit in case anyone from Kagi is here: > The new Standard plan pricing will be $5/month, with 200 free searches included. They’re not free; they’re $5/month. I know it sounds pedantic but on first read I thought, ok, so 200 free searches in addition to whatever you get for $5, which is… what? It makes it feel more complex than it is.

D13Fd 4y ago
They are "free" in the sense that any searches beyond the first 200 cost extra. They should have just said that searches beyond 200 per month cost extra.
rurp 4y ago
I found that part confusing. It sounds like they tried to use some non-standard language to sugarcoat a change they expect users to dislike.
madsbuch 4y ago
They do have team plans where each user is ~20 USD with no included searches.

SirensOfTitan 4y ago

The pricing changes are unfortunate, yes, since they encourage me to think about querying, which ought to not be the case. The more worrying update here is that Kagi is not grandfathering in legacy plans beyond the next billing cycle, which is a departure from a promise: > If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it. Kagi's claim to privacy is intrinsically tied to their capacity to keep their word. If they say one thing and do another with pricing, how can I trust they'll do what they say when it comes to privacy? I paid for Kagi the first moment I was allowed to, and this news soured me on Kagi overnight. Trust is hard to earn back.

gilrain 4y ago
I jumped on Kagi with multiple family members due to their grandfather promise. The lie hurts all the more because they aren’t a big company. If they’re already “altering the deal”, what will they do when they’re big?
cooperadymas 4y ago
Agreed on both accounts. As someone who is not even a heavy user - I have over $50 in "surplus" right now, meaning they're making money off of me - I am likely to cancel for both of these exact reasons despite the fact that the actual charge to my credit card would not change next month (and I could even cut my cost in half if I wanted to).
D13Fd 4y ago
Agreed. I also don’t like how they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and splitting their efforts between search, a pointless new browser, and AI. It’s like Google all over again. I’m happy to give them $10 or $25 per month for excellent search and privacy. But I’m really not interested in funding their other junk.
- wallmountedtv 4y ago
  An important tidbit from their Discord. The AI is just the commercial one from OpenAI. Paying $5 per 50 search summaries for it according to the founder of Kagi.[1] It is not in-house. 1: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/925992877602000967/1083381240155078676/image.png https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/925992877602000967/... (Backup: https://imgur.com/McoRELC https://imgur.com/McoRELC )

raiyni 4y ago

And with that pricing model, I'm out. I do well over 700 searches a month usually and it's not worth $255 annually for me to pay for a search engine. I've cross checked results when I got stuff I wasn't really expecting and it was nearly the same as google anyway.

oidar 4y ago
If you are already a subscriber, you get 1000 searches when the changes kick in.

user3939382 4y ago

I’ve been a huge advocate of Kagi. The $10 was a lot actually but I was willing to do it. $25, no.

hosteur 4y ago

I am a paid user of Kagi. I absolutely love the search. It is fantastic compared to Google which I have almost completely stopped using due to declining quality. I think that while the pricing is probably quite reasonable when considering the costs involved in search, Kagi is up against a mentality that web search is free. Because that has been the way it has been for all people's memory. I know it has never really been "free" because our data has been exploited by Google, and the likes. However, most people don't think that far - as is evident by the fact that Google, et al grew to the behemoths that they have become. I think they will probably need some way to ease people in to the idea of search being a paid service. Now, I live in one of the richest countries in the world, and when I pitch Kagi Seach to my friends, family and co-workers, they balk at the idea of it being a paid service. Some of these people are software engineers or IT professionals who rely heavily on search and who stands to benefit the most from the increased quality. And these are the same people who often complains about Google's declining search quality and SEO spam, etc. But still, Google is "Good Enough" and it is "free". So this is what Kagi is up against. So I think they probably need some better free tier to get people to actually experience the difference in quality. I know that the free tier is likely a huge loss leader and there is some limit to how much Kagi can provide as free. I have thought about this quite a lot since started using Kagi initially with a free tier account. My free tier account is limited to N searches per month. I run out of that number of searches in a typical workday. Problem is that I set my default search engine to Kagi on all my devices. This means that when I just type some single word just to get to a website, say, "reddit", "amazon", etc. That counts towards my limit. So that when I actually need a quality search result because I need to search for a solution to some rare error condition or similar, then I will have run out of free searches. So one idea I have thought a bit about is: not all searches are equal. This goes both for the value of the search result for the user as well as the cost of executing the search query. Some common terms like one word queries such as "facebook", "amazon", "apple", etc. would likely be trivial to cache and thus not cost as complex queries that are also likely unique. I think they should consider making non-unique, one word searches does not count towards the limit. And I would also strongly consider not having such queries require a login. The reason being that this would let many more people get started with Kagi. And also, if I am to pay even a single cent for a search that is trivial, I would go out of my way to ensure that Kagi is not a default search engine on any devices and I would try my search on one of the other engines first. Even if the cost is trivial - but it is still there and it is something I am conscious about. And what is worse: I now have a variable cost I need to worry about... Also, I think they really need to get companies on board for this. But most companies have very strict policies regarding recurring fees. That is, until the mentality around search being free changes... And solving that will likely require investing a lot in giving free searches away. It's a marketing cost. And people really need to experience how the quality and experience of search can be better than Google. Because even though Google sucks most people have a hard time envisioning what an alternative would look like.

mberning 4y ago

Sad to see this. I just cancelled my plan. To stay on an unlimited plan is over a 100% increase in price and that's just unacceptable to me.

pwpw 4y ago

A few things rub me the wrong way about this article: - I didn’t receive an email clearly indicating the pricing changes and pointing to this article. Instead, I found it on hacker news. - Every paid tier refers to the number of searches it allows as “free” despite requiring payment. - The wording around existing customers led to me believing that the pricing won’t change until cancelling the current plan (grandfathering). However, once I came to these comments I learned that pricing goes away at the end of the billing cycle and will be switched to a new plan. - Their words about average internet users’ number of searches feel so disconnected from who their actual users are and is incorrectly framing the conversation. If their goal is to truly expand to being the search that everyone uses, requiring payment will never allow that to happen. I wish they had invested in building their own crawlers rather than AI and their Kagi browser.

geoah 4y ago
Crawlers over ai would be nice indeed.

osculum 4y ago

The more disappointing part for me is that they didn’t keep the promise of grandfathering plans. I’ve lost confidence in them and will most likely cancel my subscription. Luckily search is mostly fungible.

karaterobot 4y ago

I only use about 350-450 searches a month at present, so this pricing change won't affect me. However, I've not been crazy about Kagi's search quality lately, and I'm not convinced that more deeply integrating AI into the results will solve that. I'd rather the roughly 55% of my unused subscription went to improving the core product, but I'm not going to cancel yet because Kagi still provides the value of being comparatively confidential with my data. (When it is revealed — as the narrative of this story demands it must be — that they sell you to advertisers like everybody else, I won't be surprised but I will be disappointed) Every search engine seems to be scrambling to throw AI at their product: is it because they've thoroughly tested it, and it definitely improves the results? Or is it because it's a bullet point in the feature list? Feels like there is potential, but it also feels like a gold rush too, so I'm sort of waiting skeptically to see how it will shake out.

osculum 4y ago

The most disappointing part for me is that they didn’t keep the promise of grandfathering plans. I’ve lost confidence in them and will most likely cancel my subscription. Luckily search is mostly fungible.

O-stevns 4y ago

I'm definitely a part of the outliers in those statistics given my monthly use varies.. sometime 800, other times +1200 queries. The pricing seems reasonable to me although I do not see myself paying 25 bucks for unlimited search. I'll probably stay on the 1000 queries and see where it takes me... The fact that you'll pay per queue once you hit the limit seems to have been missed by some in the thread... You do not have to upgrade to $25 unless the cost of per queue ends up being more expensive than the tier. Additionally you can set a soft and hard limit and although it's of course more expensive than the current unlimited plan, it's imo still better than the alternatives. One thing is for sure, I can't go back to Google, DDG or bing, Kagi is just so much better.

jareklupinski 4y ago

I personally don't care about AI generated summaries or anything else that 'enhances the search experience'; can I get a plan that doesn't use those flows and saves you money? All I ever wanted was to quickly find the source for a tidbit of information I know exists somewhere; I'll draw my own conclusions based on the source The only reason I switched from Google was because Kagi presented me with what I wanted on page one vs. having to waste time navigating to page two or three of Google results But over the past few weeks, the blogspam is back, and my reporting seems to do nothing...

thiht 4y ago

I for one don't mind too much this new pricing. I'm not ready to spend $10/mo in a search engine subscription, but $5/mo hits the spot for me. The only thing I'm not sure is if 200 searches per month is enough, I have no idea how many searches I do but 200 sounds pretty low. 1 search often ends up being 10 searches when you need to tweak the keywords or the quotes.

10729287 4y ago

One question I ask myself. Does the dependency to Google and Bing APIs been advertised before today ? Can't remember reading that and was genuinely thinking everything was baked in-house (yes I was naive.)

cooperadymas 4y ago
Yes, it is not something they hide. This has been discussed every time Kagi comes up, so I'd say it's fairly well known, at least in places where Kagi is known. It is documented plainly in their help text and archive.org has indexed that page as far back as October. https://web.archive.org/web/20221025065617/https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221025065617/https://help.kagi...
- 10729287 4y ago
  Thank you for your documented answer !

sb057 4y ago

>the $10 per month unlimited search plan was not financially sustainable for us The correct response to realizing your business model is unsustainable is not to double down on it.

pkulak 4y ago

What I don't understand is this idea that searches cost them 1.2 cents each. 1.2 cents is the cost of operating a 4-core, 16-gig, 5-gigabit server on AWS for nearly 5 minutes. If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. Only thing I can think of, is that they have divided their entire operating costs by number of searches a day, and 1.2 cents is not really the marginal cost of a new search, which is _super_ dishonest.

sdfhbdf 4y ago
It's Bing API usage cost as they mentioned, and Bing hiked the prices up 100%, as they mentioned. Most of their searches are combining data from Bing, Google and other sources. They never stated that this cost is their infrastructure cost.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
> If a single search cost Google 1.2 cents, Google would be paying $44 million a day to cover it. I cannot make that math work, and it makes me reticent to believe them and continue paying. You don't believe that Google is spending at least $44 million a day on providing search?

COGlory 4y ago

The core of a search product is that I want to be able to search. I don't want AI. I don't want a web browser that only works on Mac. I don't want metered searches. I wouldn't mind spending more money if it helped them develop their own scraping and be a viable alternative to Google in the future. But there's no indication they are making the business choices necessary to do that. Additionally, they said they would grandfather in old users, which they did not. I'd been subscribed for a while, but I just canceled my subscription. So disappointed.

synctheship 4y ago

I was a paying kagi subscriber for about 5-6 months before canceling my subscription. Before that I participated in the beta, and was very excited in Kagi's mission. The service did provide better search results for me than google or bing, partly due to no ads and my ability to better filter out blog spam. I legitimately enjoyed using the service, but in the end could not rationalize paying $120 a year for search. That's more than I pay all in for email, VPN, online storage, password manager, etc. I was really hoping they'd work on their own indexing and decreasing their costs. For simple, good, reliable, no advertising search I'd happily pay $5-7.50 for. I recently had a thought about re-subscribing when I got this email last night, and this pricing model is not appetizing at all. Not a fan of metering or search limits, I tried using their free plan but having to spend even a .25 of second to think if I want to use up 1 of my valuable search credits ruins the whole experience for me. In the 6 months since I unsubscribed their pricing has gone up and they are tacking on AI which they are just leveraging openai for? I'm disappointed to say the least.

mathgorges 4y ago

I'm switching my monthly plan to annual today. My read of the announcment is that this will grandfather me into unlimited search for the year, while excluding me from any of the new AI enhancments. I hope this clearly conveys my opinion on this change to whomever is bean counting :)

rurp 4y ago

I bookmarked Kagi a while back and have been using it occasionally as a failover when other search engines fail me, wondering if it would be good enough to stick as a daily driver. So far it hasn't really stood out to me but has been decent enough to keep trying. Maybe the searches I have tried so far aren't areas that it excels at? Whelp, after these account changes I won't find out. I absolutely don't want to have to think about metering my search queries per day and would bet that the vast majority of users feel the same. Hopefully Kagi can figure out a way to control their costs better and/or figure out a more accessible revenue strategy. Avoiding piling on the latest AI hype would be a good start...

dave_walko 4y ago

I am sorry, I said this when they first went pay. Vlad does not seem like a nice guy. My emails that I have exchanged with him have been very short and to the point of "he is better and knows better". I do not pay for their service due to this as well as I do not see the value. I didn't see the value with their old model, and see the value even less now. I give them another year or 2 and they will be a relic of the past. This price hike and the broken promises are a clear indication they are struggling. Welcome to the deep end of the pool, how long can you tread water?

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
>I didn't see the value with their old model, and see the value even less now. I do see the value and would be happy to pay for the $25/month unlimited plan. Search and AI are the largest boons to my productivity by a long shot. $25/month is nothing when the alternatives (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) all suck. If it was $25/day I would start to question the pricing.
- dave_walko 4y ago
  While I value your thoughts, judging by the other comments on here, you are in the minority. I REALLY did/do want to like them and their product. Being on a Mac, I have tested both their standard and beta browser. It is decent. However, after seeing Kagi go from free to paid and now being even more, I see the same happening with their browser down the road. I just do not want to invest my time into an experiment only to be treated the way they have to their users. It is just shady.

doesnt_know 4y ago

I've been a happy user since December, but I knew this change would eventually come. On the existing $10 USD a month plan I've been scraping under the "break even" usage point and I've only used it on my personal devices/outside of work. Still using google for my day job since I figure it would tip me way over the point where it would be sustainable. Sort of justified it to myself that it's technically "my employers" privacy since I'm googling things related to developing their product and nothing to do with me personally. In saying that I thought/hoped they would put in a huge drive to try and minimize the cost of search over time, not just rely on bumping up end user pricing. I don't think I can justify the price of the unlimited plan, which is what I would need if I actually used it on all my devices. That would be $40 NZD a month! For context that's more then I pay for Netflix, Disney+ and Crunchyroll combined.

krystofbe 4y ago

I switched from Kagi back to Google because Kagi was just too slow for me. The search results on Google load much faster, while the response time on Kagi was at times over 500 miliseconds.

t0bia_s 4y ago
Why not SearX, You.com, Startpage, Neeva, etc?

meatjuice 4y ago

Apparently they're struggling gathering money. It's not hard to imagine though.

runxel 4y ago

Too bad they decided to become irrelevant. Kagi was a fresh breeze and liked it very much, but by abolishing the free plan (which is now a merely short trial) and rising the prices this steeply will hurt them. It's so much eyebrow-raising, too! All I wanted is a good search, but now they try to justify by saying "oh no our shiny AI costs so much!" – a feature I did not want and neither intend to use! Same with their browser? Why is everybody so fixated in making their own? It is maddening. I recommended Kagi to all my colleagues and friends. Will stop doing that.

madsbuch 4y ago

The pricing at 10$ a month (paid as 120$ a month) was for me already too steep. But I could justify a subscription last june because of 3 reasons: 1. Philosophically: I want to pay for things I use 2. Quality: They do provide the best results 3. Experimentation: I want to try out new things The new pricing scheme has forced me to abandon it. When my current subscription stops in june it is back to Google.

kid64 4y ago

Wondering what kind of legal exposure Kagi has here? In the United States, selling something under false pretenses (like the promise of grandfathered pricing) is fraud.

mordae 4y ago

Yeah, I will probably subscribe as they introduce the family mode. Quality of the results is way better than Google and derivatives. I can once again find small blogs, various fora etc. with genuine people discussing their first-hand experience instead of generic ad farms.