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I wish there was a way to just buy 10,000 searches as a block and charge down against it. I don’t search that much. I don’t want another monthly service fee. B

I wish there was a way to just buy 10,000 searches as a block and charge down against it. I don’t search that much. I don’t want another monthly service fee. But I love the idea of paying for search. Id happily pay $5 for 300 searches, but don’t want to do that every month. This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much.

dylan604 3y ago
>This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much. I see this as the point to any subscription model. Of course they want you paying for more than you use/consume.
- prepend 3y ago
  Right and this is the reason I don’t like subscriptions. Id rather buy things. I don’t want a car subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t want a book subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t a compute subscription. I want to buy compute hours. Etc etc
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Back when Netflix/Prime were the king of paid premium (ad free) streaming essentially being the only players, there were definite months where I barely watched any content and I was a pure source of subsidy for all the other viewers. There are other times, where I swear they (Netflix) start throttling my use to sub-VHS quality. Macroblocking the size of your fist that looks like a 320x240 image scaled to the size of my TV.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates. I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier. Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the aliens final attack. How do I get out of town?
    - rfrey 3y ago
      Isn't that a lease?
      - chiefalchemist 3y ago
        Not really. Another issue I have with ownership (or leasing) is usage. While I'm sleeping...the car sits. I'm at work...the car sits. In fact, a whole lot of resources and effort goes into something that spends most of its life under utilized. Car on demand would mean less cars per person. Perhaps the UAW sees this coming?
    - adrianmonk 3y ago
      Similar use case that actually happens: hurricanes. Entire large cities evacuate. The Miami and Houston metro areas are both over 5 million in population. Forecasts give days of notice, so I guess an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service could have a million extra cars drives themselves in overnight. But refueling them would be a challenge. It's already a challenge for normal cars today (without using more fuel by rearranging fleets of cars between cities). Also, sometimes they change traffic flow for evacuations, like contraflow lane reversal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal) or using the shoulders as extra lanes. I wonder how well autonomous vehicle software handles that.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Food depreciates after you buy it. Do you buy it? Or do you lease food subscriptions. I use a car that it’s more efficient to buy it. Not because I love buying cars. Cars are just an expense and having a fixed cost is nice. Id love to live in a city that doesn’t require a car. Maybe one day again.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        Only if you're wasteful does food depreciate, but I'd argue that's not the correct word. Food is consumed after you buy it. It was used precisely for what it was intended. That's not depreciation, but I'm guessing you know this and trying to be cute?
  - rkagerer 3y ago
    >>I want to buy compute hours. Or a computER.
    - deprecative 3y ago
      > Or a computER. I barely know 'er.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Fair enough. Sell in bulk but have some minimum credits per month requirement. More or less, use'em or lose'em. Not super painful, they are paying customers :) But enough to keep it fair to the vendor. This way there's a path to paying for those who don't want or need a monthly unlimited subscription.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I really liked the suggestion from somewhere else on this topic of paying a set fee for an amount of credits to be charged against. When the balance gets low, allow them to re-up. Of course, there shouldn't be some BS type of expiration date like food products or airline miles. Pay as you go type of plans. In that way, you are paying for exactly what you use, and not just donating each month like it's a charity.
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      In this case expiring is not the same as airline miles. The product doesn't run itself. If you only want to use your credits on the odd numbers months and you expect it to be there and ready, well it still has to be there and maintained on the even numbered months. I guess you can bake that into the credits price. But if you say, purchased 100 credits today and don't use it for a year...well, who is paying for that year? Adding a small monthly fee, oddly enough, keeps the customer engaged. Airline miles are a perk.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  True, but there's also the reality that maintenance costs increase over time for software projects as upstream vendors change their pricing models and codebases grow in size and complexity. I can see why a product like Kagi wants to keep their traffic tied to recurring revenue instead of selling a bunch of credits upfront.
  - prepend 3y ago
    People would need to buy more credits. I’m not asking for an eternal membership where I pay once and am done. There would be many customers buying on different schedules and that would aggregate into a predictable cash flow. This is a solved problem as companies have sold software for 50 years. Subscriptions are more profitable, that’s why companies do it. Not because there’s any realistic business reason (other than wanting more money for less work).
    - linza 3y ago
      The incentive for the company is also different depending if they sell subscriptions or credits/usage. Kagi doesn't have competition in the paid search so space so they shouldn't need to go the subscription route yet as a differentiator. Using dark patterns like subscriptions at this point seems to me that kagi doesn't trust their product or its users.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  I think the point is having stable recurring revenue. Giving you unlimited usage means on average you'll be paying more than you use, but, unless you're seriously abusing it, you can technically cost them more than you pay. Just like you can go to the gym every day - if everyone with the membership did that they would not be able to function. But it doesn't mean you can't.
  - prepend 3y ago
    It’s like “unlimited pto.” It’s a dodge. Unlimited isn’t real, especially for something like search where it’s not like I need unlimited searches. The best gyms are pay per session. Gyms are also special because people who buy memberships and never use them subsidize real gym goers who would have to pay more for 20 sessions per month.
    - simonbarker87 3y ago
      The best gyms aren’t pay per session in my experience - and I’ve been to a lot of gyms around the world. Sure, most gyms let you buy a day pass but compared to the monthly membership it’s very expensive. My current gym is £40 a month which gives you access to every gym in the country as well) or £10 for a day pass just for that single gym for that single day. The fanciest gym I’ve ever been to was the equivalent of £30 for a day pass and like £300 for a monthly membership. Also you example of gyms being special isn’t specific to gyms, that’s also how insurance works, spread the cost out over a lot of people and everyone pays less. I agree Unlimited PTO is a con though, just give everyone an allocation and let them choose how much they use (most will use the maximum)
dbrueck 3y ago
I hear you, but it's also really hard from the service provider's perspective because - for many people at least - the allotment of searches starts to become a hinderance on using it. By making it feel a finite resource, some percentage of the users will start to ration their use of your service and/or do some deliberation before using it ("I kinda want to look that up, but I don't know if I want to spend one of my searches"), and introducing that kind of usage friction can even lead to a subtle resentment of your service.
- arp242 3y ago
  Yeah, exactly. I looked at Kagi last week (first time I had heard of it), when the $10/month plan was "only" 1,000 searches a month and "unlimited" was $25. While I think that I'll probably stay well within 1,000 searches, I'm also not sure, and it's just not something I want to have to worry about (it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it, but still...) One of the reasons I decided to skip Kagi for now.
  - bachmeier 3y ago
    > it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it That's a bit misleading. If the search engine really is that good, you should use it more, and then all of a sudden you'll hit the cap. I probably don't search that much now but that's because it's not worth the trouble.
    - prepend 3y ago
      I just don’t search that much. And I don’t want to think about how much I search. Comically, the biggest problem I have with signing up since $10 isn’t that much is that I don’t want to have to log into kagi to prove my account. I search on my phone, work computers, random terminals, etc etc. Having to userid and password to all these places disrupts my current UX of 1) open browser, 2) type search (maybe go to ddg.com first). Changing to 1) open browser, 2) log into kagi, 3) search increases my time by 100x I usually use the same browser, but I use incognito or fresh browsers at least once or twice a day.
TehShrike 3y ago
You might want to look at rigging something up with their API. To use their API, you pre-pay for credits – 25$ for 1000 searches via the API.
- prepend 3y ago
  Thanks. I was looking at this and it might be worth it as seems pretty straightforward.
- spott 3y ago
  Their api is slightly different. That is an api into their own index, but their search results are a combination of those results as well as a bunch of outside search results from places like google etc.
somsak2 3y ago
There's a reason most non-ad-supported, profitable SaaS businesses have switched to a subscription.
chongli 3y ago
I don’t even make 10,000 searches in a year. I just did a search of my browser history: 8881 visits to DDG in the past 12 months, including many duplicates where I hit the back button to click a different link on the same SERP. How much do you think it would be reasonable for them to charge for 10,000 searches? I assume this fee is supposed to sustain the company and fund all development and growth with a 100% ad-free business model, forever!
- freedomben 3y ago
  GP already said $5 per 300 searches. 10,000 would be $166.67 at that rate. Given that they allow unlimited for $10 per month, that would mean it's the equivalent revenue of 16.67 months, which seems pretty comparable to your numbers. I think you're being unreasonable toward GP.
dgacmu 3y ago
I suggest that it might be different: a lot of kagi users - of which I am one - complain about feeling internal pressure to optimize their number of searches, which leads to higher mental cost. The unlimited model is nicely brainless, which I mean in a good way: you just use it however you want, and as long as you're getting>= $10 of value from it, you keep doing so, instead of having this per-operation mental calculus of "should I preface this with !g to save a search?" I have this same unavoidable urge to optimize with other limited plans, such as cell phone plans (for voice , before everyone went unlimited anyway) and have found I'm much happier with an unlimited plan. It costs more and I value the saved mental energy more than the trivial amount of money.
fho 3y ago
That was basically their previous model. As a software developer I blew threw several hundred queries per day ... $10 for unlimited searches is the point I was waiting for to make the change.
yunwal 3y ago
It's not what you're asking for, but FYI, you can sign up for a month or a year and immediately cancel your subscription very easily on the Kagi site. You'll still have access until the end of the subscription period.
- linza 3y ago
  You probably just killed this "feature" since kagi employees are monitoring this forum :)
  - TisButMe 3y ago
    We do read the comments, but as far as I'm concerned this is a feature, not a bug :)
    - yunwal 3y ago
      FWIW, I don’t sign up for any recurring subscriptions outside of major utilities, so this feature won $108 from me.
Sakos 3y ago
I understand not wanting another subscription to pay for, but I just can't agree this is something they should do. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... This was a comment about their financials last year. This isn't a high profit business making hand over fist and exploiting users. I'm happy to pay monthly to get a service I see as valuable, especially if it ensures that this service is sustainable long-term and doesn't disappear because of money.
footlose_3815 3y ago
Subscription based services are horrible user experience and it's a show of bad faith from the vendor, IMHO. You want me to be locked into your service, wen lwell, then I don't trust you or your product. This whole post feels dirty, how it's a direct link to a blog post that just reads like a press release, and there's a ton of sus responses promoting it in this thread. Tin foil hat, are we having a reddit bot moment on HN?
- frumper 3y ago
  What is a good way to charge for an ongoing service without a subscription?
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Depends on the nature of the service - for dns, vpn and so on - thing you only really need one of - once chosen it makes sense - nextdns is 1$/month, backblaze 10 and i feel fine for subscribing. And not locked in in any way. I don't really need second one of any of those. It doesn't make sense when your consumption is spread between many vendors - like news sites or streaming services or substacks. There should be option - done one time to someone on substack. There are authors I would like to send some money, but they just don't create enough value. search engines and gpt chat bots are something in the middle - you usually have 1 + 1/2 backup. Goodle, then bing (google filter way too much some stuff), then yandex (since there torrents are not nuked). In this spot subscribing for each is too much money, but just limiting for one has real quality of life costs. Kagi seems to be somewhere here. I wish them luck - search space begs for disruption, but my hunch is that 10$/month is on the high side. On the other hand having those kind of people is valuable. A search engine for the rich will have easier time pitching value adding service.

dylan604 3y ago

>This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much. I see this as the point to any subscription model. Of course they want you paying for more than you use/consume.

prepend 3y ago
Right and this is the reason I don’t like subscriptions. Id rather buy things. I don’t want a car subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t want a book subscription. I want to buy a car. I don’t a compute subscription. I want to buy compute hours. Etc etc
- dylan604 3y ago
  Back when Netflix/Prime were the king of paid premium (ad free) streaming essentially being the only players, there were definite months where I barely watched any content and I was a pure source of subsidy for all the other viewers. There are other times, where I swear they (Netflix) start throttling my use to sub-VHS quality. Macroblocking the size of your fist that looks like a 320x240 image scaled to the size of my TV.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Cars are the one thing I don't want to buy. It's not an asset. It depreciates. I'd like to pay a reasonable monthly subscription with a small fee per mile once I go over some minimum for my tier. Once autonomous vehicles are stable, I'm presuming I'll be able to hail a car in 5 or 10 mins via app. I guess the only question is what to do in full-on emergencies. For example, when the zombie apocalypse begins, or the aliens final attack. How do I get out of town?
  - rfrey 3y ago
    Isn't that a lease?
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      Not really. Another issue I have with ownership (or leasing) is usage. While I'm sleeping...the car sits. I'm at work...the car sits. In fact, a whole lot of resources and effort goes into something that spends most of its life under utilized. Car on demand would mean less cars per person. Perhaps the UAW sees this coming?
  - adrianmonk 3y ago
    Similar use case that actually happens: hurricanes. Entire large cities evacuate. The Miami and Houston metro areas are both over 5 million in population. Forecasts give days of notice, so I guess an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service could have a million extra cars drives themselves in overnight. But refueling them would be a challenge. It's already a challenge for normal cars today (without using more fuel by rearranging fleets of cars between cities). Also, sometimes they change traffic flow for evacuations, like contraflow lane reversal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal) or using the shoulders as extra lanes. I wonder how well autonomous vehicle software handles that.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Food depreciates after you buy it. Do you buy it? Or do you lease food subscriptions. I use a car that it’s more efficient to buy it. Not because I love buying cars. Cars are just an expense and having a fixed cost is nice. Id love to live in a city that doesn’t require a car. Maybe one day again.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Only if you're wasteful does food depreciate, but I'd argue that's not the correct word. Food is consumed after you buy it. It was used precisely for what it was intended. That's not depreciation, but I'm guessing you know this and trying to be cute?
- rkagerer 3y ago
  >>I want to buy compute hours. Or a computER.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    > Or a computER. I barely know 'er.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chiefalchemist 3y ago
Fair enough. Sell in bulk but have some minimum credits per month requirement. More or less, use'em or lose'em. Not super painful, they are paying customers :) But enough to keep it fair to the vendor. This way there's a path to paying for those who don't want or need a monthly unlimited subscription.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I really liked the suggestion from somewhere else on this topic of paying a set fee for an amount of credits to be charged against. When the balance gets low, allow them to re-up. Of course, there shouldn't be some BS type of expiration date like food products or airline miles. Pay as you go type of plans. In that way, you are paying for exactly what you use, and not just donating each month like it's a charity.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    In this case expiring is not the same as airline miles. The product doesn't run itself. If you only want to use your credits on the odd numbers months and you expect it to be there and ready, well it still has to be there and maintained on the even numbered months. I guess you can bake that into the credits price. But if you say, purchased 100 credits today and don't use it for a year...well, who is paying for that year? Adding a small monthly fee, oddly enough, keeps the customer engaged. Airline miles are a perk.
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
True, but there's also the reality that maintenance costs increase over time for software projects as upstream vendors change their pricing models and codebases grow in size and complexity. I can see why a product like Kagi wants to keep their traffic tied to recurring revenue instead of selling a bunch of credits upfront.
- prepend 3y ago
  People would need to buy more credits. I’m not asking for an eternal membership where I pay once and am done. There would be many customers buying on different schedules and that would aggregate into a predictable cash flow. This is a solved problem as companies have sold software for 50 years. Subscriptions are more profitable, that’s why companies do it. Not because there’s any realistic business reason (other than wanting more money for less work).
  - linza 3y ago
    The incentive for the company is also different depending if they sell subscriptions or credits/usage. Kagi doesn't have competition in the paid search so space so they shouldn't need to go the subscription route yet as a differentiator. Using dark patterns like subscriptions at this point seems to me that kagi doesn't trust their product or its users.
moonchrome 3y ago
I think the point is having stable recurring revenue. Giving you unlimited usage means on average you'll be paying more than you use, but, unless you're seriously abusing it, you can technically cost them more than you pay. Just like you can go to the gym every day - if everyone with the membership did that they would not be able to function. But it doesn't mean you can't.
- prepend 3y ago
  It’s like “unlimited pto.” It’s a dodge. Unlimited isn’t real, especially for something like search where it’s not like I need unlimited searches. The best gyms are pay per session. Gyms are also special because people who buy memberships and never use them subsidize real gym goers who would have to pay more for 20 sessions per month.
  - simonbarker87 3y ago
    The best gyms aren’t pay per session in my experience - and I’ve been to a lot of gyms around the world. Sure, most gyms let you buy a day pass but compared to the monthly membership it’s very expensive. My current gym is £40 a month which gives you access to every gym in the country as well) or £10 for a day pass just for that single gym for that single day. The fanciest gym I’ve ever been to was the equivalent of £30 for a day pass and like £300 for a monthly membership. Also you example of gyms being special isn’t specific to gyms, that’s also how insurance works, spread the cost out over a lot of people and everyone pays less. I agree Unlimited PTO is a con though, just give everyone an allocation and let them choose how much they use (most will use the maximum)

dbrueck 3y ago

I hear you, but it's also really hard from the service provider's perspective because - for many people at least - the allotment of searches starts to become a hinderance on using it. By making it feel a finite resource, some percentage of the users will start to ration their use of your service and/or do some deliberation before using it ("I kinda want to look that up, but I don't know if I want to spend one of my searches"), and introducing that kind of usage friction can even lead to a subtle resentment of your service.

arp242 3y ago
Yeah, exactly. I looked at Kagi last week (first time I had heard of it), when the $10/month plan was "only" 1,000 searches a month and "unlimited" was $25. While I think that I'll probably stay well within 1,000 searches, I'm also not sure, and it's just not something I want to have to worry about (it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it, but still...) One of the reasons I decided to skip Kagi for now.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  > it's ~33/day on average and I doubt I'll ever hit it That's a bit misleading. If the search engine really is that good, you should use it more, and then all of a sudden you'll hit the cap. I probably don't search that much now but that's because it's not worth the trouble.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I just don’t search that much. And I don’t want to think about how much I search. Comically, the biggest problem I have with signing up since $10 isn’t that much is that I don’t want to have to log into kagi to prove my account. I search on my phone, work computers, random terminals, etc etc. Having to userid and password to all these places disrupts my current UX of 1) open browser, 2) type search (maybe go to ddg.com first). Changing to 1) open browser, 2) log into kagi, 3) search increases my time by 100x I usually use the same browser, but I use incognito or fresh browsers at least once or twice a day.

TehShrike 3y ago

You might want to look at rigging something up with their API. To use their API, you pre-pay for credits – 25$ for 1000 searches via the API.

prepend 3y ago
Thanks. I was looking at this and it might be worth it as seems pretty straightforward.
spott 3y ago
Their api is slightly different. That is an api into their own index, but their search results are a combination of those results as well as a bunch of outside search results from places like google etc.

somsak2 3y ago

There's a reason most non-ad-supported, profitable SaaS businesses have switched to a subscription.

chongli 3y ago

I don’t even make 10,000 searches in a year. I just did a search of my browser history: 8881 visits to DDG in the past 12 months, including many duplicates where I hit the back button to click a different link on the same SERP. How much do you think it would be reasonable for them to charge for 10,000 searches? I assume this fee is supposed to sustain the company and fund all development and growth with a 100% ad-free business model, forever!

freedomben 3y ago
GP already said $5 per 300 searches. 10,000 would be $166.67 at that rate. Given that they allow unlimited for $10 per month, that would mean it's the equivalent revenue of 16.67 months, which seems pretty comparable to your numbers. I think you're being unreasonable toward GP.

dgacmu 3y ago

I suggest that it might be different: a lot of kagi users - of which I am one - complain about feeling internal pressure to optimize their number of searches, which leads to higher mental cost. The unlimited model is nicely brainless, which I mean in a good way: you just use it however you want, and as long as you're getting>= $10 of value from it, you keep doing so, instead of having this per-operation mental calculus of "should I preface this with !g to save a search?" I have this same unavoidable urge to optimize with other limited plans, such as cell phone plans (for voice , before everyone went unlimited anyway) and have found I'm much happier with an unlimited plan. It costs more and I value the saved mental energy more than the trivial amount of money.

fho 3y ago

That was basically their previous model. As a software developer I blew threw several hundred queries per day ... $10 for unlimited searches is the point I was waiting for to make the change.

yunwal 3y ago

It's not what you're asking for, but FYI, you can sign up for a month or a year and immediately cancel your subscription very easily on the Kagi site. You'll still have access until the end of the subscription period.

linza 3y ago
You probably just killed this "feature" since kagi employees are monitoring this forum :)
- TisButMe 3y ago
  We do read the comments, but as far as I'm concerned this is a feature, not a bug :)
  - yunwal 3y ago
    FWIW, I don’t sign up for any recurring subscriptions outside of major utilities, so this feature won $108 from me.

Sakos 3y ago

I understand not wanting another subscription to pay for, but I just can't agree this is something they should do. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... This was a comment about their financials last year. This isn't a high profit business making hand over fist and exploiting users. I'm happy to pay monthly to get a service I see as valuable, especially if it ensures that this service is sustainable long-term and doesn't disappear because of money.

footlose_3815 3y ago

Subscription based services are horrible user experience and it's a show of bad faith from the vendor, IMHO. You want me to be locked into your service, wen lwell, then I don't trust you or your product. This whole post feels dirty, how it's a direct link to a blog post that just reads like a press release, and there's a ton of sus responses promoting it in this thread. Tin foil hat, are we having a reddit bot moment on HN?

frumper 3y ago
What is a good way to charge for an ongoing service without a subscription?
ReptileMan 3y ago
Depends on the nature of the service - for dns, vpn and so on - thing you only really need one of - once chosen it makes sense - nextdns is 1$/month, backblaze 10 and i feel fine for subscribing. And not locked in in any way. I don't really need second one of any of those. It doesn't make sense when your consumption is spread between many vendors - like news sites or streaming services or substacks. There should be option - done one time to someone on substack. There are authors I would like to send some money, but they just don't create enough value. search engines and gpt chat bots are something in the middle - you usually have 1 + 1/2 backup. Goodle, then bing (google filter way too much some stuff), then yandex (since there torrents are not nuked). In this spot subscribing for each is too much money, but just limiting for one has real quality of life costs. Kagi seems to be somewhere here. I wish them luck - search space begs for disruption, but my hunch is that 10$/month is on the high side. On the other hand having those kind of people is valuable. A search engine for the rich will have easier time pitching value adding service.