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I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). Thi

I am quite interested by Kagi's model, and would like to try it. One issue is that I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). This seems like a shame. I'd love to understand more re: how they come up with those prices in the first place, if any information is available. It would also be interesting to explore how many of the people praising it here and elsewhere are paying customers.

NeckBeardPrince 3y ago
You're paying Kagi for privacy.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.
  - dropofwill 3y ago
    They’ve been pretty open about the pricing strategy on the blog. Earlier this year they said they were losing money on most accounts at $10/month. They’ve since changed the pricing tiers a few times, but it sounds like they’re in a better place now.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What is their privacy policy?
  - TisButMe 3y ago
    https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy - it's not written in legalese.
toasteros 3y ago
At the risk of sounding like a kagi marketer/shill/peddler/whatever, if it helps at all, it's actually not just search. Sort of. Kagi is slowly rolling out some AI-backed features, and will probably work in other areas too. Two of the flagship AI bits right now are Quick Answer and the Universal Summariser. Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary. The other tool takes an article and summarises it. I used this on some blog posts of my own and it actually pretty much regurgitated my own thought process. I haven't used it for much else right now, but it's neat. It also has a beta chat feature which allows you to ask questions about an article, although I tried this with a Guardian article and it didn't pick out small details when asked. And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. So far. I don't know if I'll renew or switch to annual but so far so good, honestly.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  > Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary. Oh yes, I've experienced a similar problem with ChatGPT. I asked it to look up a certain fact and provide references, and the ones it did provide ended up being quasi URLs which didn't actually work. Perhaps they were from the old (2018, was it?) dataset and got replaced, not sure. I eventually gave up and used Google Scholar, though :-) > It also has a beta chat feature This seems interesting, though I'm secretly (or not so, now it's on here) hoping it's not another lazy ChatGPT integration (i.e. Discord, Snapchat, Bing Chat, etc.); ChatGPT seems to be the new Stories: everyone adds it, they're virtually the same, and they still somehow come in in varying degrees of usefulness (e.g. for some arbitrary reason, Snapchat's one can't output JSON...). > And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. This is intriguing -- may I ask in what way it's better? Are there any anecdotes you could share? To be frank, I've heard a lot of "Google is dead" talk on here, though if it's that bad surely people would have switched away? Market inertia and vendor lock-in are solid counteraguments, though. I personally use DuckDuckGo, and find that acceptable; it does fall down in a few cases, where I have to rephrase my query to get something useful out of it. It's surprisingly good, though... Maybe Kagi is worth a shot, but I still do find the pricing tiers quite unforgiving. Take the "Starter" plan, for instance: that's 300 searches; for me, that would roughly equate to 10 instances of research on really niche topics; that's not even counting the searches I do for things like Stack Exchange, or general engineering advice / questions. According to DuckDuckGo[0] (which Kagi quotes in their informational), the "average person" makes one search a day -- that doesn't sound right at all. [0]: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/ https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/
UberFly 3y ago
Pricing information is actually available. They've been really upfront about what and why the costs are what they are. I pay for it for myself ($5 a month) and would love to expand to my wife and kids, but yea, its expanding price quickly nullifies that idea.
redserk 3y ago
I'd argue web search is the most underappreciated types of sites. There are a lot of functions on the web I can work around, but a quality search engine's usefulness ranges from time-saver to "critically important tool to find obscure documentation that isn't easily found on a vendor's site".
Yeri 3y ago
They've blogged about it: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... They are aware that it's not within reach for everyone, and hopefully they'll be able to do something about it (likely with scale: more subscribers, means they can slowly lower the prices as they've done: https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes)
JohnFen 3y ago
> I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). But it's web search that works well. My experience is that Google is awful, DDG is reasonable, and Kagi is good. Search is very important to me, and if I have to pay to be able to have a good search engine, I'm OK with that.

NeckBeardPrince 3y ago

You're paying Kagi for privacy.

tentacleuno 3y ago
Well, that speaks for itself -- my comment was more in regards to how they come up with pricing tiers in the first place.
- dropofwill 3y ago
  They’ve been pretty open about the pricing strategy on the blog. Earlier this year they said they were losing money on most accounts at $10/month. They’ve since changed the pricing tiers a few times, but it sounds like they’re in a better place now.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 3y ago
What is their privacy policy?
- TisButMe 3y ago
  https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy - it's not written in legalese.

toasteros 3y ago

At the risk of sounding like a kagi marketer/shill/peddler/whatever, if it helps at all, it's actually not just search. Sort of. Kagi is slowly rolling out some AI-backed features, and will probably work in other areas too. Two of the flagship AI bits right now are Quick Answer and the Universal Summariser. Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary. The other tool takes an article and summarises it. I used this on some blog posts of my own and it actually pretty much regurgitated my own thought process. I haven't used it for much else right now, but it's neat. It also has a beta chat feature which allows you to ask questions about an article, although I tried this with a Guardian article and it didn't pick out small details when asked. And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. So far. I don't know if I'll renew or switch to annual but so far so good, honestly.

tentacleuno 3y ago
> Quick Answer collates your search results and gives you a summary of them, with inline references included. This can be alternately useful or somewhat humorous, and sometimes not even a little bit useful. For example, I share a name with a researcher who happens to have worked at the same university I do. I am not an academic and my namesake died several years ago. Quick Answer lumps us into the same person, and I get to read my own obituary. Oh yes, I've experienced a similar problem with ChatGPT. I asked it to look up a certain fact and provide references, and the ones it did provide ended up being quasi URLs which didn't actually work. Perhaps they were from the old (2018, was it?) dataset and got replaced, not sure. I eventually gave up and used Google Scholar, though :-) > It also has a beta chat feature This seems interesting, though I'm secretly (or not so, now it's on here) hoping it's not another lazy ChatGPT integration (i.e. Discord, Snapchat, Bing Chat, etc.); ChatGPT seems to be the new Stories: everyone adds it, they're virtually the same, and they still somehow come in in varying degrees of usefulness (e.g. for some arbitrary reason, Snapchat's one can't output JSON...). > And then I'm also finding the search experience to just be better than Google. This is intriguing -- may I ask in what way it's better? Are there any anecdotes you could share? To be frank, I've heard a lot of "Google is dead" talk on here, though if it's that bad surely people would have switched away? Market inertia and vendor lock-in are solid counteraguments, though. I personally use DuckDuckGo, and find that acceptable; it does fall down in a few cases, where I have to rephrase my query to get something useful out of it. It's surprisingly good, though... Maybe Kagi is worth a shot, but I still do find the pricing tiers quite unforgiving. Take the "Starter" plan, for instance: that's 300 searches; for me, that would roughly equate to 10 instances of research on really niche topics; that's not even counting the searches I do for things like Stack Exchange, or general engineering advice / questions. According to DuckDuckGo[0] (which Kagi quotes in their informational), the "average person" makes one search a day -- that doesn't sound right at all. [0]: https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/ https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/

UberFly 3y ago

Pricing information is actually available. They've been really upfront about what and why the costs are what they are. I pay for it for myself ($5 a month) and would love to expand to my wife and kids, but yea, its expanding price quickly nullifies that idea.

redserk 3y ago

I'd argue web search is the most underappreciated types of sites. There are a lot of functions on the web I can work around, but a quality search engine's usefulness ranges from time-saver to "critically important tool to find obscure documentation that isn't easily found on a vendor's site".

Yeri 3y ago

They've blogged about it: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan... They are aware that it's not within reach for everyone, and hopefully they'll be able to do something about it (likely with scale: more subscribers, means they can slowly lower the prices as they've done: https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes)

JohnFen 3y ago

> I do find it a little pricey (it's roughly £110/yr just for web search). But it's web search that works well. My experience is that Google is awful, DDG is reasonable, and Kagi is good. Search is very important to me, and if I have to pay to be able to have a good search engine, I'm OK with that.