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I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just

I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month? That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.

yzydserd 3y ago
> the cost just seems insane My kagi subscription is literally the best value subscription or recurring-charge item I have in any part of my life, online or offline.
karma_pharmer 3y ago
[dead]
truculent 3y ago
Google makes about 200bn per year in advertising revenue (see quarterly figures here: https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-437041 https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-43704...). The world’s population is about 7.8bn, with about 60% of people being online (https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet). If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search. 200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person. So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  Kagi claims that Google themselves peg it at 300 USD per user per year.
  - truculent 3y ago
    That includes other sources of revenue, I believe; although I could be wrong. Do you have a source?
neurostimulant 3y ago
They pay google and others for search data, and those are expensive. For example, google charges $5/1000 query: https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/9069107 https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/906910...
x0x0 3y ago
This is a précis of how software gets so bad -- people refuse to pay for the value it delivers to them, so the software vendors naturally look for other ways to make money. And the advertising starts. If you don't want enshittification, then you need to pay for the things companies build for you.
actionfromafar 3y ago
Isn't it a matter of scale still though? Presumably search engine cost could be much less per account once you have as many users as Netflix has. Assuming a large chunk of the cost of Kagi is the quality and curating, not just sheer server OPEX. (Maybe a bold assumption, I don't have insight.)
mordae 3y ago
Most of it goes to Google. I am based in central Europe and Kagi is less than 1/2 of my hourly rate per month. And it definitely saves at least that much.
- MyFirstSass 3y ago
  Really? I was ready to ditch Google not pay them through third parties. Oh well..
  - mordae 3y ago
    I totally get you, but we both have work to do and through Kagi it's easier and more respectful to our attention spans. Google is getting the money either way. At least for now.
piva00 3y ago
I use Kagi an order or two of magnitude more than what I use the streaming services I pay for. It's a small operation with no VC money to dump prices and subsidise it for you, it's very in line to what I imagine paying for under these conditions.
olieidel 3y ago
I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable" products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable. The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).
- stemlord 3y ago
  If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you, it adds up to the point where we'd all have to start touching grass for most of the day while general purpose computation becomes more exclusively for the affluent. I mean maybe that's a good thing but it feels pretty radical from status quo
  - schmorptron 3y ago
    That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search. But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.
  - truculent 3y ago
    We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go? If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.
bananapub 3y ago
> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or why is that hard to imagine? the fixed costs of a search engine are enormous, and Google has 1) coming on three decades of investment in sunk costs and 2) billions of users now. > providing that much value. that's obviously a personal judgement you have to make for yourself. having a quite good search engine that is happy to just take my money in exchange for a useful service is definitely worth three coffees/month to me.
dfxm12 3y ago
Theoretically, you're not just paying for the lost revenue on serving ads and/or server costs, but also the lost revenue on harvesting your personal data.
summerlight 3y ago
If you really want to have a good option for ad-free search engines, you will need to pay more than what search engines could get from ad revenue. And this is a non-trivial amount; Google's ARPU is reportedly more than hundreds bucks. Given its scale, Kagi might be running at loss even with $10/month...
JohnFen 3y ago
I pay for Kagi and I honestly feel that I get more than my money's worth out of it. YMMV, of course. Maybe it isn't worth it to you. But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my searches. In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested in were almost entirely unfindable. But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.
- jterrys 3y ago
  Kagi is one of those things that immediately clicks once you actually use it. Then you do a quick cost benefit analysis: how much money am I really saving when I use a "free" search engine that is intentionally shitty? If it takes me 2 hours to find a solution to something that took kagi 10 minutes,I've effectively saved almost 2 hours of my time and money. I can actually be more productive. Less headaches and frustration too.
- __jonas 3y ago
  > But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier. It’s a trial, you get 100 searches for free, then you have to start paying. I don’t think you can call it a free tier but it’s a nice offer to evaluate the service before paying. I tried it for a bit and wasn’t happy with the search results, but I might try again though and use up my remaining searches.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    I double checked because I was about to correct you, and you're right, but I could've sworn it used to be monthly (still low limit, but resets) so maybe GP remembers that too. Or perhaps it just wasn't as clear that it was a one-time trial before, and we both misread.
    - __jonas 3y ago
      Looks like it used to be a free plan with a usage limit when they first launched in 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/...
gmuslera 3y ago
Essentially $10 to take out the garbage, because the one that did it for "free" is doing a bad job at it.
troyvit 3y ago
* It's a gallon of grass-fed milk every month. * It's a car wash every month. * It's two mid-range store-bought frozen pizzas every month * It's one Febreeze plug-in air freshener complete with 2 oil refills every month * You would be out just over 300 matches per month if you instead put that money towards Kagi. * And in homage to A Tiny Armageddon it is about 500 plastic spoons per month.
- stavros 3y ago
  Or about 1/30th of your salary, here.
- pschuegr 3y ago
  two cups of coffee from Starbucks
  - Fnoord 3y ago
    I just don't get these coffee comparisons. I don't know about you but I get free coffee at work on location, and at home the coffee is reasonably good that a Starbucks is not worth it.
    - ninjamuffin99 3y ago
      To explain the coffee comparisons, people like to buy coffee as a daily expense around the 3-5$. not exclusively starbucks, but it is a part of many people’s routines. so its a useful frame of reference for most people. hope this helps
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Well at home you get the coffee from somewhere, compare to that? I buy a bag of I think 250g beans for £7.95 (about $10 I suppose, conveniently) and without travel I probably get through at least four bags in a month. That's much more coffee that Kagi costs than if I was getting it at Starbucks, but it still puts it in perspective I think. (And the coffee tastes much better.)
    - non-chalad 3y ago
D13Fd 3y ago
It would be worth it at 10x the price. $10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area. I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition is very good. Every once in a while I’ll use a computer that doesn’t have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these days. Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi’s API access. But until then I’m very happy to pay $10/month for greatly improved search.
- stavros 3y ago
  $10 is half a day's wage where I live. Do I not deserve internet search?
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Lol at 10 times? What about 100 times? Does it start losing value? Google is not worried about a paid search engine that indexes less and if they were they would buy kagi. And yes Kagi would sell.
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    People aren't always as money motivated as that. The founder of Kagi is pretty intent on making it work well. And given the way they're raising I don't think money is the pure driver, but making the business sustainable. I wouldn't believe they haven't had offers already.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
KoolKat23 3y ago
I agree. I just can't justify it. Been trying to convince myself for a while. Even if it cost $0.01 a search that's 10000 queries. Kagi is $5 for the first 300 that's very pricey for only 10 searches a day. $10 I get the feeling is cheaper in the USA than it is in Europe purchasing parity or earnings wise.
- esdf 3y ago
  1000, not 10000
  - KoolKat23 3y ago
    My bad
antisthenes 3y ago
> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value. How many thousands of hours did you save by using Internet search, compared to having to go to a library and find that information in books? Even if you value your time at some laughable amount, like $1/hr, Kagi (or any other alternative) would still be worth it. Also, $10 just isn't what it used to be. It doesn't even get you a fast food meal anymore.
- lttlrck 3y ago
  A combo at In-n-Out is around $7 IIRC. And that's in California.
smusamashah 3y ago
They have a 5 per month plan as well.
supertron 3y ago
What's insane to me is that Kagi is so good for the relatively little funding they have. Maybe when they have the subscriber numbers of Netflix they can reduce their monthly fee (not that I even personally think they need to), but for now I'm quite happy to pay them for a good service. I'm increasingly a big fan of very direct revenue models. I pay for the product. I am *not the product*. It's not just search either, their summariser tool is great, their Mac browser Orion is really impressive, and their attitude in general - eg. promoting signal over noise in everything they do (see Kagi Small Web), is just extremely refreshing.
yen223 3y ago
If I had to choose, I'd probably give up Netflix before I give up Google, even if Google decided to fuck it and charge everyone $10/month for searches. Search is just that valuable to me.
- powersnail 3y ago
  How much people are willing to pay for something is deeply influenced by the competitors' price point, which in search, is zero, because Google exists. Whereas Netflix's competitors (apart from piracy) are more or less offering the same deal. You have to be specifically interested in Kagi's selling point over Google to want to pay for Kagi, rather than needing search in a general way.
  - bluish29 3y ago
    Actually I think comparison between piracy and Netflix is a good example here. Piracy is free but it needs some arrangement and you go though sources that is not safe, spam and malware. This is true on case of Google searched which is full of ads (that sometimes phishing attacks) spam and AI crap now. Kagi makes it much easier to actually get what you want. And as always you can't have your cake and eat it too. You will need to pick what is important for you.
traverseda 3y ago
I said the same thing when it was $20 per month, and caved in at $10.
mmcwilliams 3y ago
Those streaming services have other revenue sources like embedded advertisements which underwrite large amounts of those production costs.
rchaud 3y ago
$10/mo was the price to lure in the masses years ago, they all cost more than that now for ad-free viewing. In any case, price is not reflective of streaming's actual economics because those were either subsidized by VCs (Netflix) or are an arm of a corporate behemoth (Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros) that can afford to lose money there in exchange for customer acquisition.
Fnoord 3y ago
This is hard to argue. 10 USD can be a lot of money for poor people, especially those in less wealthy areas of the world. I've recently trialed Kagi, was happy with my first 100 searches, so I went for the 300 option for 5 USD/month. Unfortunately, I used that up pretty quickly. What I often do is start a search, then do a better query. And so on. I went back to DDG (though I never see adds w/that). It is unlikely I will stick to it though. I hate having to log in in private browser mode, and for me it is worth 5 USD/month but not 10 USD/month. Btw, the dog is hilarious. And I don't even like dogs!
- teroshan 3y ago
  > I hate having to log in in private browser mode You can configure a private browser session link [1] which prevents having to log in in private mode. I use in on both chrome and Firefox on my desktop, and on Firefox mobile on my android smartphone. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....
idiotsecant 3y ago
Let's be real here, 10 bucks is what you spend on a not even very great sandwhich. It's not insane to pay that for what is one of the more important tools in modern life. Its 10 bucks. For a tool that searches the sum of human knowledge. Your ancestors would be ashamed.
- krapp 3y ago
  If you're paying more than 10 bucks for a sandwich, you're getting robbed. If you're paying $10 a month for technology that used to be free everywhere, and that worked in the previous millennium, you're getting robbed.
  - kataklasm 3y ago
    You're right, but it's not Kagi Search that is doing the robbing: it's all the ad-tech aggressors of the last decade plus.
  - PaulRobinson 3y ago
    It was never free. You just weren't paying directly for it.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Would you pay $10 for the best sandwich in the world? It's just a sandwich, but it's the best in the world. Would you pay $10 for the best search engine in the world? It's just a search engine, but the best in the world.

yzydserd 3y ago

> the cost just seems insane My kagi subscription is literally the best value subscription or recurring-charge item I have in any part of my life, online or offline.

karma_pharmer 3y ago

[dead]

truculent 3y ago

Google makes about 200bn per year in advertising revenue (see quarterly figures here: https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-437041 https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-43704...). The world’s population is about 7.8bn, with about 60% of people being online (https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet). If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search. 200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person. So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.

PaulRobinson 3y ago
Kagi claims that Google themselves peg it at 300 USD per user per year.
- truculent 3y ago
  That includes other sources of revenue, I believe; although I could be wrong. Do you have a source?

neurostimulant 3y ago

They pay google and others for search data, and those are expensive. For example, google charges $5/1000 query: https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/9069107 https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/906910...

x0x0 3y ago

This is a précis of how software gets so bad -- people refuse to pay for the value it delivers to them, so the software vendors naturally look for other ways to make money. And the advertising starts. If you don't want enshittification, then you need to pay for the things companies build for you.

actionfromafar 3y ago

Isn't it a matter of scale still though? Presumably search engine cost could be much less per account once you have as many users as Netflix has. Assuming a large chunk of the cost of Kagi is the quality and curating, not just sheer server OPEX. (Maybe a bold assumption, I don't have insight.)

mordae 3y ago

Most of it goes to Google. I am based in central Europe and Kagi is less than 1/2 of my hourly rate per month. And it definitely saves at least that much.

MyFirstSass 3y ago
Really? I was ready to ditch Google not pay them through third parties. Oh well..
- mordae 3y ago
  I totally get you, but we both have work to do and through Kagi it's easier and more respectful to our attention spans. Google is getting the money either way. At least for now.

piva00 3y ago

I use Kagi an order or two of magnitude more than what I use the streaming services I pay for. It's a small operation with no VC money to dump prices and subsidise it for you, it's very in line to what I imagine paying for under these conditions.

olieidel 3y ago

I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable" products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable. The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).

stemlord 3y ago
If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you, it adds up to the point where we'd all have to start touching grass for most of the day while general purpose computation becomes more exclusively for the affluent. I mean maybe that's a good thing but it feels pretty radical from status quo
- schmorptron 3y ago
  That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search. But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.
- truculent 3y ago
  We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go? If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.

bananapub 3y ago

> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or why is that hard to imagine? the fixed costs of a search engine are enormous, and Google has 1) coming on three decades of investment in sunk costs and 2) billions of users now. > providing that much value. that's obviously a personal judgement you have to make for yourself. having a quite good search engine that is happy to just take my money in exchange for a useful service is definitely worth three coffees/month to me.

dfxm12 3y ago

Theoretically, you're not just paying for the lost revenue on serving ads and/or server costs, but also the lost revenue on harvesting your personal data.

summerlight 3y ago

If you really want to have a good option for ad-free search engines, you will need to pay more than what search engines could get from ad revenue. And this is a non-trivial amount; Google's ARPU is reportedly more than hundreds bucks. Given its scale, Kagi might be running at loss even with $10/month...

JohnFen 3y ago

I pay for Kagi and I honestly feel that I get more than my money's worth out of it. YMMV, of course. Maybe it isn't worth it to you. But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my searches. In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested in were almost entirely unfindable. But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.

jterrys 3y ago
Kagi is one of those things that immediately clicks once you actually use it. Then you do a quick cost benefit analysis: how much money am I really saving when I use a "free" search engine that is intentionally shitty? If it takes me 2 hours to find a solution to something that took kagi 10 minutes,I've effectively saved almost 2 hours of my time and money. I can actually be more productive. Less headaches and frustration too.
__jonas 3y ago
> But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier. It’s a trial, you get 100 searches for free, then you have to start paying. I don’t think you can call it a free tier but it’s a nice offer to evaluate the service before paying. I tried it for a bit and wasn’t happy with the search results, but I might try again though and use up my remaining searches.
- OJFord 3y ago
  I double checked because I was about to correct you, and you're right, but I could've sworn it used to be monthly (still low limit, but resets) so maybe GP remembers that too. Or perhaps it just wasn't as clear that it was a one-time trial before, and we both misread.
  - __jonas 3y ago
    Looks like it used to be a free plan with a usage limit when they first launched in 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/...

gmuslera 3y ago

Essentially $10 to take out the garbage, because the one that did it for "free" is doing a bad job at it.

troyvit 3y ago

* It's a gallon of grass-fed milk every month. * It's a car wash every month. * It's two mid-range store-bought frozen pizzas every month * It's one Febreeze plug-in air freshener complete with 2 oil refills every month * You would be out just over 300 matches per month if you instead put that money towards Kagi. * And in homage to A Tiny Armageddon it is about 500 plastic spoons per month.

stavros 3y ago
Or about 1/30th of your salary, here.
pschuegr 3y ago
two cups of coffee from Starbucks
- Fnoord 3y ago
  I just don't get these coffee comparisons. I don't know about you but I get free coffee at work on location, and at home the coffee is reasonably good that a Starbucks is not worth it.
  - ninjamuffin99 3y ago
    To explain the coffee comparisons, people like to buy coffee as a daily expense around the 3-5$. not exclusively starbucks, but it is a part of many people’s routines. so its a useful frame of reference for most people. hope this helps
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Well at home you get the coffee from somewhere, compare to that? I buy a bag of I think 250g beans for £7.95 (about $10 I suppose, conveniently) and without travel I probably get through at least four bags in a month. That's much more coffee that Kagi costs than if I was getting it at Starbucks, but it still puts it in perspective I think. (And the coffee tastes much better.)
  - non-chalad 3y ago

D13Fd 3y ago

It would be worth it at 10x the price. $10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area. I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition is very good. Every once in a while I’ll use a computer that doesn’t have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these days. Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi’s API access. But until then I’m very happy to pay $10/month for greatly improved search.

stavros 3y ago
$10 is half a day's wage where I live. Do I not deserve internet search?
ipaddr 3y ago
Lol at 10 times? What about 100 times? Does it start losing value? Google is not worried about a paid search engine that indexes less and if they were they would buy kagi. And yes Kagi would sell.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  People aren't always as money motivated as that. The founder of Kagi is pretty intent on making it work well. And given the way they're raising I don't think money is the pure driver, but making the business sustainable. I wouldn't believe they haven't had offers already.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

KoolKat23 3y ago

I agree. I just can't justify it. Been trying to convince myself for a while. Even if it cost $0.01 a search that's 10000 queries. Kagi is $5 for the first 300 that's very pricey for only 10 searches a day. $10 I get the feeling is cheaper in the USA than it is in Europe purchasing parity or earnings wise.

esdf 3y ago
1000, not 10000
- KoolKat23 3y ago
  My bad

antisthenes 3y ago

> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value. How many thousands of hours did you save by using Internet search, compared to having to go to a library and find that information in books? Even if you value your time at some laughable amount, like $1/hr, Kagi (or any other alternative) would still be worth it. Also, $10 just isn't what it used to be. It doesn't even get you a fast food meal anymore.

lttlrck 3y ago
A combo at In-n-Out is around $7 IIRC. And that's in California.

smusamashah 3y ago

They have a 5 per month plan as well.

supertron 3y ago

What's insane to me is that Kagi is so good for the relatively little funding they have. Maybe when they have the subscriber numbers of Netflix they can reduce their monthly fee (not that I even personally think they need to), but for now I'm quite happy to pay them for a good service. I'm increasingly a big fan of very direct revenue models. I pay for the product. I am *not the product*. It's not just search either, their summariser tool is great, their Mac browser Orion is really impressive, and their attitude in general - eg. promoting signal over noise in everything they do (see Kagi Small Web), is just extremely refreshing.

yen223 3y ago

If I had to choose, I'd probably give up Netflix before I give up Google, even if Google decided to fuck it and charge everyone $10/month for searches. Search is just that valuable to me.

powersnail 3y ago
How much people are willing to pay for something is deeply influenced by the competitors' price point, which in search, is zero, because Google exists. Whereas Netflix's competitors (apart from piracy) are more or less offering the same deal. You have to be specifically interested in Kagi's selling point over Google to want to pay for Kagi, rather than needing search in a general way.
- bluish29 3y ago
  Actually I think comparison between piracy and Netflix is a good example here. Piracy is free but it needs some arrangement and you go though sources that is not safe, spam and malware. This is true on case of Google searched which is full of ads (that sometimes phishing attacks) spam and AI crap now. Kagi makes it much easier to actually get what you want. And as always you can't have your cake and eat it too. You will need to pick what is important for you.

traverseda 3y ago

I said the same thing when it was $20 per month, and caved in at $10.

mmcwilliams 3y ago

Those streaming services have other revenue sources like embedded advertisements which underwrite large amounts of those production costs.

rchaud 3y ago

$10/mo was the price to lure in the masses years ago, they all cost more than that now for ad-free viewing. In any case, price is not reflective of streaming's actual economics because those were either subsidized by VCs (Netflix) or are an arm of a corporate behemoth (Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros) that can afford to lose money there in exchange for customer acquisition.

Fnoord 3y ago

This is hard to argue. 10 USD can be a lot of money for poor people, especially those in less wealthy areas of the world. I've recently trialed Kagi, was happy with my first 100 searches, so I went for the 300 option for 5 USD/month. Unfortunately, I used that up pretty quickly. What I often do is start a search, then do a better query. And so on. I went back to DDG (though I never see adds w/that). It is unlikely I will stick to it though. I hate having to log in in private browser mode, and for me it is worth 5 USD/month but not 10 USD/month. Btw, the dog is hilarious. And I don't even like dogs!

teroshan 3y ago
> I hate having to log in in private browser mode You can configure a private browser session link [1] which prevents having to log in in private mode. I use in on both chrome and Firefox on my desktop, and on Firefox mobile on my android smartphone. [1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....

idiotsecant 3y ago

Let's be real here, 10 bucks is what you spend on a not even very great sandwhich. It's not insane to pay that for what is one of the more important tools in modern life. Its 10 bucks. For a tool that searches the sum of human knowledge. Your ancestors would be ashamed.

krapp 3y ago
If you're paying more than 10 bucks for a sandwich, you're getting robbed. If you're paying $10 a month for technology that used to be free everywhere, and that worked in the previous millennium, you're getting robbed.
- kataklasm 3y ago
  You're right, but it's not Kagi Search that is doing the robbing: it's all the ad-tech aggressors of the last decade plus.
- PaulRobinson 3y ago
  It was never free. You just weren't paying directly for it.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Would you pay $10 for the best sandwich in the world? It's just a sandwich, but it's the best in the world. Would you pay $10 for the best search engine in the world? It's just a search engine, but the best in the world.