7 ms·

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

by chrisweekly 2y ago

Spivak 2y ago
You won't ever get big with this scheme but you can be sustainable.
- Tostino 2y ago
  There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.
  - edanm 2y ago
    This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example). The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.
    - Tostino 2y ago
      I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital. If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.
      - edanm 2y ago
        First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined. In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation. (The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)
        Retric 2y ago
        VC funded companies are into the trillions of total investment (100+B / year adds up). That’s a small but meaningful fraction of global wealth for such a tiny slice of companies. It’s not that these are necessarily bad investments, but growth at any cost tends to suck up a lot more talent than the business actually justifies. Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.
        edanm 2y ago
        Yeah, they're into trillions, but aren't they like 5% of most pension funds, which are the biggest stores of wealth? Also, if you're looking at trillions invested, I'd hardly call them startups or speculative investments. It's certainly true that something like OpenAI or Uber spent (and still spend?) many years without making profit, but by the time they're raising rounds of billions, it's no longer anywhere near the same level of risk, and the statistic that "most fail" rings less true.
  - dmje 2y ago
    As founder of a 15 year micro consultancy I'm nodding along. We've chosen quite deliberately not to grow. I don't want staff or huge wads of cash, I don't want to be rich; I want a gentle, family focused, sustainable, comfortable life. Why grow and face all the stress of growing when I'm perfectly happy with things as they are? Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for. I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
  - DannyBee 2y ago
    SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that. That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty. It is a fascinating read though. So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
- fweimer 2y ago
  For Kagi, there is a big question mark around the availability of the third-party search API endpoints they rely on. If search evolves further and further away from textual matching, that will impact them as well. (For search providers, it could be commercially reasonable to replace more or less traditional document indexing with a way to synthesize responses—at a very high level similar to what some analytical tools for time series do.) I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.
scarface_74 2y ago
Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”. Edit: that should be 29K subscribers
- Spivak 2y ago
  Do you mean 20k? I doubt they 10x'd growth since January. For a bootstrapped business whose end-goal is sustainability that's doing great. When you don't have shareholders breathing down your neck for exponential returns the calculus changes.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416
    - gcanyon 2y ago
      I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        The full story of what happened to the original kagi https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hosteur 2y ago
wrasee 2y ago
Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.
- masa331 2y ago
  I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription
- xigoi 2y ago
  According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.
  - wrasee 2y ago
    If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable. The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?
    - TylerE 2y ago
      It if supporting each customer costs them, say, $2.50
    - 2y ago
pembrook 2y ago
By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes). If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves. Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model. Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.
  - pembrook 2y ago
    Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam
      - adaptbrian 2y ago
        It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  …unlike many "growing" "successful" "businesses".
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Can't argue that the people don't stay very busy, even if the company is just leaking investor money.
anothername12 2y ago
I would like to use Kagi if it had some kind of anonymous searching

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Spivak 2y ago

You won't ever get big with this scheme but you can be sustainable.

Tostino 2y ago
There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.
- edanm 2y ago
  This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example). The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.
  - Tostino 2y ago
    I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital. If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.
    - edanm 2y ago
      First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined. In any case, I'm not sure I trust you, me or anyone to be smarter about how to get innovation than our current relatively-free-market capitalistic system, where there's actually pretty good incentives to pursue innovation. Look at how many things today that absolutely improve our world have been created through this messy process. It's apparently monetarily worth it to have 95 failed startups in order to get 5 ones that change the world, and that's probably a good thing for society, because the world is better than it war 20 years ago in terms of technology/innovation. (The world is worse in other ways, and a different criticism of tech is that some of it can also be negative for society, but that's a separate concern than it being wasteful, which I just don't agree with.)
      - Retric 2y ago
        VC funded companies are into the trillions of total investment (100+B / year adds up). That’s a small but meaningful fraction of global wealth for such a tiny slice of companies. It’s not that these are necessarily bad investments, but growth at any cost tends to suck up a lot more talent than the business actually justifies. Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.
        edanm 2y ago
        Yeah, they're into trillions, but aren't they like 5% of most pension funds, which are the biggest stores of wealth? Also, if you're looking at trillions invested, I'd hardly call them startups or speculative investments. It's certainly true that something like OpenAI or Uber spent (and still spend?) many years without making profit, but by the time they're raising rounds of billions, it's no longer anywhere near the same level of risk, and the statistic that "most fail" rings less true.
- dmje 2y ago
  As founder of a 15 year micro consultancy I'm nodding along. We've chosen quite deliberately not to grow. I don't want staff or huge wads of cash, I don't want to be rich; I want a gentle, family focused, sustainable, comfortable life. Why grow and face all the stress of growing when I'm perfectly happy with things as they are? Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for. I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
- DannyBee 2y ago
  SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that. That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty. It is a fascinating read though. So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.
fweimer 2y ago
For Kagi, there is a big question mark around the availability of the third-party search API endpoints they rely on. If search evolves further and further away from textual matching, that will impact them as well. (For search providers, it could be commercially reasonable to replace more or less traditional document indexing with a way to synthesize responses—at a very high level similar to what some analytical tools for time series do.) I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.

scarface_74 2y ago

Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”. Edit: that should be 29K subscribers

Spivak 2y ago
Do you mean 20k? I doubt they 10x'd growth since January. For a bootstrapped business whose end-goal is sustainability that's doing great. When you don't have shareholders breathing down your neck for exponential returns the calculus changes.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Yep typo - 20K - fixing. I always thought Kagi was still the old Mac focused company that enabled independent software makers to collect payments from customers. I didn’t realize that the old company had been out of business for years until I heard the founder interview on the Talk Show podcast https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416 https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416
  - gcanyon 2y ago
    I knew Key back in the day, and I feel a twinge for him every time kagi comes up on HN.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      The full story of what happened to the original kagi https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling-prey-to-fraud https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling... And relevant to this submission. I couldn’t find any information on Google, I used the paid version of ChatGPT that has had web search for almost two years
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hosteur 2y ago

wrasee 2y ago

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing. But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter. I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.

masa331 2y ago
I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription
xigoi 2y ago
According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.
- wrasee 2y ago
  If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable. The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?
  - TylerE 2y ago
    It if supporting each customer costs them, say, $2.50
  - 2y ago

pembrook 2y ago

By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes). If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves. Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model. Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.

Aeolun 2y ago
I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.
- pembrook 2y ago
  Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam
    - adaptbrian 2y ago
      It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.

carlosjobim 2y ago

Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
…unlike many "growing" "successful" "businesses".
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Can't argue that the people don't stay very busy, even if the company is just leaking investor money.

anothername12 2y ago

I would like to use Kagi if it had some kind of anonymous searching