8 ms·

Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools

92 points by darthShadow 3y ago

Sphax 3y ago
This is cool, even though I haven’t managed to use the monthly 1k searches from the early adopter plan yet. I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  I quite like that I can have non-localized search by default, and specify a location easily with a bang (like !fr) when needed.
  - Sphax 3y ago
    I had no idea you could do that, super cool.
esafak 3y ago
Back to Kagi from Neeva, I guess. Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!
- sph 3y ago
  Eh, if there's one thing I would definitely pay with crypto, is access to a search engine to make me a little harder to trace.
  - sshine 3y ago
    There’s a difference between accepting cryptocurrencies as payment, and rewarding you with an NFT every time you perform a search.
- freediver 3y ago
  > Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad! Lol, force is still strong with us, and we are commited to our mission. No distractions!
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Since you've used both, which one respect AND queries? Google and DuckDuckGo both ignore me when I type 2 terms for the sake of showing me more ads. I just checked. Doesn't matter. Neeva is shutting down.
Semaphor 3y ago
Oh wow, that’s a lot. For me, it brings the Professional and Duo plans into the sweet spot (I usually have over 700 but less than 900 searches). I’m not really using the AI features, so for now I’ll stay with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features), but it’s good to know it’s an option now. I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)
- freediver 3y ago
  > with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features) Those limits are gone with this announcement too.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    Oh wow, nice :)
itchynosedev 3y ago
I ran over a 1000 searches as an early adopter last month and this is a welcome change. I also notice how often I search for the same thing over and over, or use product name searches using Kagi as a gateway. I think this shows how poor my learning comprehension / documenting habits are. Thanks for bumping up the limits, though. I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- freediver 3y ago
  What makes a great difference is search quality is blocking sites you don't like/don't want to see. This propagates across all types of results (eg images/news too) I use lenses for specialised searches (I have one for HN/Reddit) ND recipes (to avoid spammy sites). My favorite lenses are "non-commercial" (to surface results from the non-commercial part of the web) and "forums" (usually similar thing but focusing on human comments).
- kelvie 3y ago
  I also ran over last month. Now I find that I rely heavily on the firefox smart bar to go to pages I've been to before, as well as rely on "bangs" more, which don't count toward the searches. E.g. !archwiki !mdn !gmaps
californical 3y ago
I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes). Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google) I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page). Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.
- runnerup 3y ago
  I think Neeva needed user signup growth more than it needed cash. It was reasonably well funded through VC. If it had shown adoption growth they would have received more VC money to continue even if they were losing money on each user. Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.
  - freediver 3y ago
    Well put, "time in market" is a thing when going against a habit so entrenched as search is.
- zirgs 3y ago
  How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN? I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.
sph 3y ago
As an early adopter doing 1200 searches a month, this is a good change. I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota. As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend. Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better. I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.
- benhurmarcel 3y ago
  Well on my side I've been quite happy with their summarizer tool. It doesn't mess with my query, but saves time when I want an overview of some long content or video.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota. Is it really that important to stay within the quota? You're literally counting cents.
spookie 3y ago
Seems I'm back to kagi :) Only thing I need is better non-anglosphere results, but it's understandable for now.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  What kinds of results are you trying to find?
plaguepilled 3y ago
I would love a "dumb" search that strips out EVERYTHING except the results and their summaries. No AI. No images. Nothin'. At present I just filter it out with ublock, but I wish I didn't have to, y'know?
- jerjerjer 3y ago
  "Dumb" things are going away. Wanted to buy a small speaker recently. Almost every model is riddled with: 1) Smart assistans 2) Manufacturer app (with treble/bass/eq controls locked in app). Same things with TV and many more home appliances. We are expected to pay extra to finance data collection ops on ourselves and be happy for the priviledge.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    High end small speakers still are mostly usable, with purely optional apps. Look into B&O.
    - jerjerjer 3y ago
      B&O sounds great (tried Emerge), but they are ridiculously overpriced. Bought Marshall Middleton - no assistants, no mandatory app, jack input, bass/treble buttons.
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  My problem isn't that I have to filter, but the remaining part is pretty much useless. Google is worse every day. Bing isn't getting any better either. DDG is of course Bing, with extra filters. Yandex is.. well... for some very niche searches it's actually nice, as long as it's a topic Russians don't care about. But they display a captcha every 2nd click. Marginalia goes only for niche sites, which is great if you are looking for that. But it avoids mainstream. Have been playing with Mojeek recently, but it seems to lack a bunch of websites also. Personally I'm considering running my personal Marginalia (at least it's open source), with my own sitefilter. But still just considering.
- darthmallrat 3y ago
wodenokoto 3y ago
How does their AI services compare to chatgpt+?
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  The Universal Summarizer is very impressive and a huge time saver, haven't used the rest.
ryanjshaw 3y ago
Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1] The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it. Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them. To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Those don’t seem like overtly/overly political causes to me.
- theage 3y ago
  >humanizing the web How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.
  - freediver 3y ago
    Here is a detailed explaination: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
    - theage 3y ago
      >AI should be used to support users, not replace them Doesn't square. AI doesn't replace your users? it threatens to replace your content creators. You treat users as smart enough to assess every webpage you send them to but too dumb to assess the outputs of emergent LLMs. Both are text on a screen. Refusing to serve juicy steak because babies can't chew them or because there is 20 years of dried beef jerky in reserve to sell first.
DarthNebo 3y ago
what a spam article for HN
ulrikrasmussen 3y ago
Oh, what a nice coincidence! I signed up for Kagi Standard last month and today I hit my 200 search limit this morning. 300 searches will be plenty for a month's use. Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.
entropyie 3y ago
Good to know, I was close to my limit this month! Keep up the good work.
nottorp 3y ago
What's a Kagi search? I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again. I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus. Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode. Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?
- nicky0 3y ago
  If the page is not cached by the browser, but its instead reloaded from the Kagi server then it would be a new search.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Looks to me like they need to cache search result sets then before it's fair. I have to have an account anyway. Not to mention incrementally refining a search by adding/removing/changing keywords. Those limits start to look increasingly low to me. As in, not your main search engine but the option to use when all else fails. Of course they don't mind because it's subscription pricing.
    - rand_flip_bit 3y ago
      Kagi already does this, performing the same search multiple time’s doesn’t count against you (from my testing), so they must be caching, or your browser does, not sure.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Does it matter? You're talking about less than 2 cents. We all have a finite time, do you want to spend your days worrying about a few cents? The energy and time you spend on that could make you at least 4 cents or even more if put to other purposes.
  - nottorp 3y ago
password4321 3y ago
These alternative search engines need to partner with Mullvad for payment authentication to maximize privacy.
- jsnell 3y ago
  Mullvad have their own alternative search engine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397
  - andrewinardeer 3y ago
    They don't. It is a front end to the Google Search API. https://leta.mullvad.net/faq https://leta.mullvad.net/faq
TradingPlaces 3y ago
Great product; happy subscriber. I never bumped up against the 1k searches, but thanks anyway, Vlad!
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Time to take them for a spin I guess. I'm done with Google not respecting my queries. 2 words. I want them both on the page. If I want synonyms I'll type the synonym. It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...

92 points by darthShadow 3y ago

This is cool, even though I haven’t managed to use the monthly 1k searches from the early adopter plan yet. I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.

benhurmarcel 3y ago
I quite like that I can have non-localized search by default, and specify a location easily with a bang (like !fr) when needed.
- Sphax 3y ago
  I had no idea you could do that, super cool.

esafak 3y ago

Back to Kagi from Neeva, I guess. Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!

sph 3y ago
Eh, if there's one thing I would definitely pay with crypto, is access to a search engine to make me a little harder to trace.
- sshine 3y ago
  There’s a difference between accepting cryptocurrencies as payment, and rewarding you with an NFT every time you perform a search.
freediver 3y ago
> Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad! Lol, force is still strong with us, and we are commited to our mission. No distractions!
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Since you've used both, which one respect AND queries? Google and DuckDuckGo both ignore me when I type 2 terms for the sake of showing me more ads. I just checked. Doesn't matter. Neeva is shutting down.

Semaphor 3y ago

Oh wow, that’s a lot. For me, it brings the Professional and Duo plans into the sweet spot (I usually have over 700 but less than 900 searches). I’m not really using the AI features, so for now I’ll stay with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features), but it’s good to know it’s an option now. I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)

freediver 3y ago
> with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features) Those limits are gone with this announcement too.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Oh wow, nice :)

itchynosedev 3y ago

I ran over a 1000 searches as an early adopter last month and this is a welcome change. I also notice how often I search for the same thing over and over, or use product name searches using Kagi as a gateway. I think this shows how poor my learning comprehension / documenting habits are. Thanks for bumping up the limits, though. I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
freediver 3y ago
What makes a great difference is search quality is blocking sites you don't like/don't want to see. This propagates across all types of results (eg images/news too) I use lenses for specialised searches (I have one for HN/Reddit) ND recipes (to avoid spammy sites). My favorite lenses are "non-commercial" (to surface results from the non-commercial part of the web) and "forums" (usually similar thing but focusing on human comments).
kelvie 3y ago
I also ran over last month. Now I find that I rely heavily on the firefox smart bar to go to pages I've been to before, as well as rely on "bangs" more, which don't count toward the searches. E.g. !archwiki !mdn !gmaps

californical 3y ago

I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes). Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google) I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page). Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.

runnerup 3y ago
I think Neeva needed user signup growth more than it needed cash. It was reasonably well funded through VC. If it had shown adoption growth they would have received more VC money to continue even if they were losing money on each user. Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.
- freediver 3y ago
  Well put, "time in market" is a thing when going against a habit so entrenched as search is.
zirgs 3y ago
How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN? I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.

sph 3y ago

As an early adopter doing 1200 searches a month, this is a good change. I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota. As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend. Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better. I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.

benhurmarcel 3y ago
Well on my side I've been quite happy with their summarizer tool. It doesn't mess with my query, but saves time when I want an overview of some long content or video.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota. Is it really that important to stay within the quota? You're literally counting cents.

spookie 3y ago

Seems I'm back to kagi :) Only thing I need is better non-anglosphere results, but it's understandable for now.

Minor49er 3y ago
What kinds of results are you trying to find?

plaguepilled 3y ago

I would love a "dumb" search that strips out EVERYTHING except the results and their summaries. No AI. No images. Nothin'. At present I just filter it out with ublock, but I wish I didn't have to, y'know?

jerjerjer 3y ago
"Dumb" things are going away. Wanted to buy a small speaker recently. Almost every model is riddled with: 1) Smart assistans 2) Manufacturer app (with treble/bass/eq controls locked in app). Same things with TV and many more home appliances. We are expected to pay extra to finance data collection ops on ourselves and be happy for the priviledge.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  High end small speakers still are mostly usable, with purely optional apps. Look into B&O.
  - jerjerjer 3y ago
    B&O sounds great (tried Emerge), but they are ridiculously overpriced. Bought Marshall Middleton - no assistants, no mandatory app, jack input, bass/treble buttons.
not_your_vase 3y ago
My problem isn't that I have to filter, but the remaining part is pretty much useless. Google is worse every day. Bing isn't getting any better either. DDG is of course Bing, with extra filters. Yandex is.. well... for some very niche searches it's actually nice, as long as it's a topic Russians don't care about. But they display a captcha every 2nd click. Marginalia goes only for niche sites, which is great if you are looking for that. But it avoids mainstream. Have been playing with Mojeek recently, but it seems to lack a bunch of websites also. Personally I'm considering running my personal Marginalia (at least it's open source), with my own sitefilter. But still just considering.
darthmallrat 3y ago

wodenokoto 3y ago

How does their AI services compare to chatgpt+?

DoingIsLearning 3y ago
The Universal Summarizer is very impressive and a huge time saver, haven't used the rest.

ryanjshaw 3y ago

Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1] The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it. Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them. To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html

sokoloff 3y ago
Those don’t seem like overtly/overly political causes to me.
theage 3y ago
>humanizing the web How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.
- freediver 3y ago
  Here is a detailed explaination: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy
  - theage 3y ago
    >AI should be used to support users, not replace them Doesn't square. AI doesn't replace your users? it threatens to replace your content creators. You treat users as smart enough to assess every webpage you send them to but too dumb to assess the outputs of emergent LLMs. Both are text on a screen. Refusing to serve juicy steak because babies can't chew them or because there is 20 years of dried beef jerky in reserve to sell first.

DarthNebo 3y ago

what a spam article for HN

ulrikrasmussen 3y ago

Oh, what a nice coincidence! I signed up for Kagi Standard last month and today I hit my 200 search limit this morning. 300 searches will be plenty for a month's use. Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.

entropyie 3y ago

Good to know, I was close to my limit this month! Keep up the good work.

nottorp 3y ago

What's a Kagi search? I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again. I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus. Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode. Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?

nicky0 3y ago
If the page is not cached by the browser, but its instead reloaded from the Kagi server then it would be a new search.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Looks to me like they need to cache search result sets then before it's fair. I have to have an account anyway. Not to mention incrementally refining a search by adding/removing/changing keywords. Those limits start to look increasingly low to me. As in, not your main search engine but the option to use when all else fails. Of course they don't mind because it's subscription pricing.
  - rand_flip_bit 3y ago
    Kagi already does this, performing the same search multiple time’s doesn’t count against you (from my testing), so they must be caching, or your browser does, not sure.
carlosjobim 3y ago
Does it matter? You're talking about less than 2 cents. We all have a finite time, do you want to spend your days worrying about a few cents? The energy and time you spend on that could make you at least 4 cents or even more if put to other purposes.
- nottorp 3y ago

password4321 3y ago

These alternative search engines need to partner with Mullvad for payment authentication to maximize privacy.

jsnell 3y ago
Mullvad have their own alternative search engine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397
- andrewinardeer 3y ago
  They don't. It is a front end to the Google Search API. https://leta.mullvad.net/faq https://leta.mullvad.net/faq

TradingPlaces 3y ago

Great product; happy subscriber. I never bumped up against the 1k searches, but thanks anyway, Vlad!

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Time to take them for a spin I guess. I'm done with Google not respecting my queries. 2 words. I want them both on the page. If I want synonyms I'll type the synonym. It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...