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Kagi Reaches 50k Users
- selfselfgo 1y ago[dead]
- moralestapia 1y agoOoof ... I thought they were doing way better. People truly don't gaf about anything as long as they're getting something for free. Sad. I assume this is paying users, if this is total MAU ... damn. PS. I do not mean Kagi is a bad product. I think they're great, actually. I'm just complaining about how poor the reception has been.
- TylerE 1y agoAlternatively: People really really hate micropayments and metered billing.
- dymk 1y agoThey offer unlimited searches for $10/month, you don’t need to do metered billing
- sshine 1y agoKinda. Their Search API is not freely available, and I believe their current cost structure is preventing its popularisation. Which means I can’t embed Kagi Search or Assistant into my open source products because APIs are second-class citizens. To be fair, it seems like this makes sense for them economically, and maybe it even makes sense for growing in the right direction. But as someone who would rather use their API, it’s a pity Search and Assistant aren’t there.
- 112233 1y agoI am sample size 1 of people! I love metered billing! I would gladly use metered plan with top-up credit if kagi had one. Once I tried openrouter, I am not touching any subscription LLM providers. Google/Microsoft/Apple "all-in-one" personal subscriptions are a different beast, because they charge well below cost.
- zombiwoof 1y ago[flagged]
- tchbnl 1y ago50K _paying users_ for a _search engine_. That's no small feat.
- baobabKoodaa 1y ago50k paying users is not nothing. And the trendline points in the right direction. Also, the products are good.
- moralestapia 1y agoCan you cite the part of my comment where I wrote "50k users is nothing"?
- sshine 1y ago> Ooof ... I thought they were doing way better.
- dymk 1y ago[flagged]
- moralestapia 1y ago[flagged]
- sshine 1y agoThis horse is dead.
- sshine 1y agoThis is paying users. And what matters to me is: that it’s enough to keep going, securing the service, and that the number is steadily increasing.
- moralestapia 1y ago>that it’s enough to keep going How do you know? My napkin math says they're in red numbers, but let's see yours! :)
- sjs382 1y agohttps://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi Profitable as of a year ago
- sshine 1y agohttps://nicolaiarocci.com/kagi-is-profitable/ https://nicolaiarocci.com/kagi-is-profitable/ They reached profitability one year ago, two years into their existence. It’s a cool company. Edit: Corrected from two years to one year
- moralestapia 1y agoHuh? ~Buddy, we are still in 2025 ...~ (removed, parent comment corrected) If they were profitable then why did they raise money again? >inb4, to expand their business If that's the reason, where is this expansion? Their growth curve looks exactly the same since they started ... IMO they invested a lot of money into their AI efforts, so maybe they raised for R&D? I want them to do well, it's just that I thought they already had a much larger market share.
- sshine 1y ago> where is this expansion? They hired a technical architect and an email engineer, so the biggest expansion is clearly into email hosting. But I imagine that AI R&D continues. I hope they consider more agentic extensions than search.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bruce511 1y agoThis is not exactly a surprise. Paying to remove ads is a tiny market. As much as we like to complain about ads, we also aren't really prepared to fund things that aren't ad driven. Frankly on the web, for me, ads are fine. For TV less so. I pay for streaming (no ads) and for sport (no ad interruptions) etc. For search, half the time I'm clicking on the ad anyway.
- jan_g 1y agoIf they didn't take investments (and therefore not beholden to all that unicorn expectations), then it's totally fine. They've reached profitability sometime last yer, if I remember correctly. It was discussed also here on hacker news.
- sshine 1y agoThey took 92 presumably smaller investors, so no VC.
- Aurornis 1y ago> People truly don't gaf about anything as long as they're getting something for free. Sad. I think Kagi is great. I also understand why most people don’t need Kagi. It’s not hard to see why most people aren’t interested in yet another monthly payment on top of all the other things we’re asked to pay for right now.
- sshine 1y agoIt’s deductible if you run a small company.
- drawfloat 1y agoBut it’s still an additional expense that many do not need.
- sshine 1y agoNobody needs an additional expense. Well, unless you're working for government and next year's budget depends on this year's expenses. Most modern people need search engines. And most people don't care about advertising and having their private data sold. And most of those who do are happy to use adblockers and/or free alternatives to Google that still show ads, but may or may not collect as much data about you. So it is indeed a niche: People who want to pay for search and AI, when both of those are "free". As for having an AI broker instead of getting it straight from the model companies: I think the economic incentives are better. I don't want bloated answers, just because the model companies make money per token. I want to either pay for each token, or pay a lump sum to somebody who optimizes the result for me and pockets the difference.
- hotmeals 1y ago"Only" 50K paying customers, in a market where all the oligopolistic incumbents have been offering the product for free for more than 20 years. Of course that's sad for the average SV-type that is thinking about hypergrowth (a.k.a buying users with the equivalent of CC debt).
- eviks 1y agoStrange take, this is a premium product, of course it's not going to sell itself into world domination even if people care
- hmottestad 1y ago760 600 queries per day. That’s about 8.8 queries per second. Per user it’s about 15 queries per day. I’m sure there will be some that are incredibly active and some that aren’t active at all, but 15 per day seems quite reasonable.
- rckclmbr 1y agoI have 515 since may 16 putting me as 22. So ya, math checks out. Love the service, been using them since March 2024
- amelius 1y agoI wonder how much people's search behavior has changed since chatgpt.
- hedora 1y agoIf you append ? to the end of a query, kagi runs the query through an llm that cites its sources. It very rarely hallucinates at this point, but I still click through to check. I keep trying chatgpt style products, but rarely reach for them because I don’t really have a concrete use case for them. I use ? all the time, code completion at work and regularly generate images. Generic chat can do those things but is never as good as specialized tools I have access to. My guess is that purpose-built specialized expert AIs are going to end up being more useful than the “everything” products like the chatgpt UI, but time will tell, I guess.
- amelius 1y agoI mean, I used to search on Google for specific stackoverflow posts. I have never done that since I started using chatgpt etc. I have no numbers but I bet my # of searches/day went down drastically because of that alone.
- addandsubtract 1y agoIs the AI search part of the normal search plan or charged extra? Because atm, I'm still using Perplexity on a trial plan, but would like to try Kagi if it did the same, but used a better underlying search engine.
- demosthanos 1y agoNote that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago): > We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience. As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience. Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche. https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi
- eviks 1y agoSearch isn't that business since staying small means you won't be able to create a good index of the world. And you won't have enough resources for your browser.
- 0_gravitas 1y agoAnd yet, somehow, they've managed quite well :^)
- eviks 1y agoThey haven't, but also that wasn't the argument
- decimalenough 1y agoHuh? Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point, to the point that 50k people are willingly paying $10/mo extra for it. Obviously they don't have the ancillary services (Maps etc), but for just searching, Kagi is far more likely to surface useful results instead of just the highest bidder. Compare a search like "us esta" for a clear demonstration.
- Osiris 1y agoI've been a paying member for a while now. I'm happy to support a company that isn't Google or Microsoft for search.
- nektro 1y agocongrats on the milestone!
- theanonymousone 1y agoConvincing any one of those 50k people to ditch a free product for a paid one is a miracle by itself. Congrats to Kagi! However, is there really no other model than these two, i.e. being 100% the product vs. paying the "full price" of the search?
- burnished 1y agoI suspect the 'slippery slope' applies here
- roughly 1y agoAdvertising is a fungus. You let it into any part of your product and it’ll be everywhere before you know it.
- UberFly 1y agoSure. Kagi could just start showing ads to subscribers who only want to pay half price. That awesome Netflix model.
- jaggederest 1y agoAKA "The worst of both worlds"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- imafish 1y agoTV channels were doing this for decades before Netflix did.
- AdamN 1y agoAnd newspapers and magazines. You pay for the magazine and you also get the ads inside.
- 1y ago
- malnourish 1y agoExtremely happy ultimate tier subscriber. I like Orion, but I hope they focus mostly on Kagi.
- joshjob42 1y agoI love Orion and it'd be my main browser if only a) Vimium worked and b) they'd add or enable web panel extensions ala old Zen, Vivaldi, or Edge. I'd pay $30/mo to use Kagi such an Orion.
- torrance 1y agoIf you select "All data" for their user count, you'll notice a sharp shift in the gradient of the user count about a year ago. Any idea what would cause this?
- jdhendrickson 1y agoGoogles seemingly inexorable slide into becoming unusable seems to have picked up speed around then.
- simoncion 1y agoFor me, it's that combined with the prominent placement of the output of answer confabulators alongside search results. Given how terrible the output was initially, and how it is still not-infrequently awful, it reminds me of when Google was in "We've desperately gotta pump up the user numbers for Google Plus or else we'll lose the Race For Social!" mode and adding it to every big thing they controlled. I'm still mad that they took away the '+' operator for that turd of a project. [0] [0] To be clear, it totally could have been a great project. Early on, there were signs that it was going to be -at worst- decent. But, well, Vivek Gundotra wanted the project to be a big turd, so it ended up being a big turd.
- cyberax 1y agoI think, they have started blending in some AI results into the main search feed. And not just for ads, it would be understandable. My personal example, I was trying to find consultants that could help with passing the Apple Store review. Somehow, Google decided to show me the ferry timetable: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59 https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59 Like, whut?
- kid64 1y agoBut will Kagi survive the upcoming loss of the Bing Search API 2 months from now? I don't think I've heard the plan for that yet.
- lazycouchpotato 1y agoLarge customers like DuckDuckGo are unaffected by the API retirement [1]. I don't know if Kagi is one of them. It seems that Kagi isn't expecting that things will change much [2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/bing-microsoft-api-support-ending/ https://www.wired.com/story/bing-microsoft-api-support-endin... [2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/7107-microsoft-bing-retiring-search-api-what-does-that-mean-for-kagi/4 https://kagifeedback.org/d/7107-microsoft-bing-retiring-sear...
- BrendanEich 1y agoFind Kagi's logo in the "Used by some of the biggest names in Tech..." gallery below the fold at https://brave.com/search/api/ https://brave.com/search/api/.
- zoul 1y agoI love it. It feels great to have a search engine built for users, not advertisers or investors. Trivial stuff like being able to remove some domains from search results. Or not having to wade through AI bullshit to get to the results. Or, you know, not having your search queries sold to whatever advertising partners that care about my privacy.
- zxexz 1y agoI love to use the service, though often forget to. I’ve been a paying member since they offered a plan. I think I’ve only made a few hundred searches. Almost all of those have been during deep dives when I finally get fed up enough to remember Kagi.
- phildenhoff 1y agoWhy not set it up as your default search engine? That’s what I did. Hard to forget when it’s the default
- zxexz 1y agoI dunno, I guess out of principle I don't like my 'defaults' to be something I have to be logged into.
- 1270018080 1y agoI like the concept of this product but the search results are pretty bad and I really like google maps and flights. It'll take a long time for to be competitive with those features, if ever.
- patchymcnoodles 1y agoFor me the search results are much better. Even more since sometimes Google is full of AI and ads. And what does Maps and Flight has to do with it? I use Kagi and still Google Maps and Flight.
- robin_reala 1y agoThe !gmaps and !gflights bangs are available.
- sph 1y agoYet the !g bang does not work any more. I get that they want to replace Google, but removing such a bang is user-hostile and I'm unhappy about it for those 2 times a month I need to compare with Google's results. EDIT: nvm it works iff you add the bang at the start of the query, for some reason.
- robin_reala 1y agoIt does? I just tested with "!g test" and got redirected to https://www.google.com/search?q=test https://www.google.com/search?q=test as expected. Not that I ever really use that bang any more given how bad Google’s results have become.
- sph 1y agoAh, it works only at the start of the query. I always put it at the end (you do a normal query, and add the bang the second time around) which used to work on DDG which introduced them.
- chilldsgn 1y agoI've been on the free tier for a short time and really liking it. I just can't justify paying at least $5 a month (I live in South Africa) for this, so not switching to paid yet. It's just a bit too much with our exchange rate.
- tough 1y agothey should really move to geo-based pricing like some other SaaS do, 5usd in america aren't 5 usd in the rest of the world indeed
- Squarex 1y agoThey probably have same costs for every user. They would be losing money if they charged significantly less for users in developing countries.
- nottorp 1y agoWell then they'll be stuck with the Starbucks sipping crowd. My lattes are far less expensive than that.
- plutokras 1y agoThey have fixed costs per query. Unlike VC-backed companies burning cash for market share, they need sustainable unit economics to stay profitable. This makes regional pricing hard to pull off. I know I'm speaking form a position of privilege and this will be unpopular; but I'm not fond of subsidizing other users by paying premium prices for my subscriptions.
- mkayokay 1y agoAlso with regional pricing one must ensure the lock out all those people who want the service cheaper than in their country and try using VPNs or other means. Otherwise you loose even more money.
- 1y ago
- bicepjai 1y agoI tried Kagi a year ago and could not come to terms with nof searches as payment options .Constantly thinking about if I should search or not was a big reason. Now I use perplexity. Would love to try Kagi if payment plan changes
- xigoi 1y agoYou can get unlimited searches for $10/month.
- Unearned5161 1y agoI love Kagi, and have been a proud user for almost a year now. Lately, however, the more I read about Vlad and the variety of things the company is working on, the more I get worried. My (potentially naive) hope is that more companies enter this sector of paid search engines and the competition helps iron out the kinks. I want nothing more than a good set of options to choose from.
- fl0id 1y agoYeah same. Super worried
- erlend_sh 1y agoI’d be much more at ease with their long term prospects if they begun the process of transitioning to a cooperative or steward-ownership, so that they’re less at risk of CEO-capture.
- SllX 1y agoI mean I'm fine with them as they are now, corporate-structure-wise. What happens if Kagi starts to suck? I stop paying for it and move on with my life, so rather than worrying about what could happen, I'll just enjoy it for what it is now. If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
- Unearned5161 1y agointeresting to observe in their queries graph that tuesdays and wednesdays are peak traffic days with a difference of 200k queries compared with sundays
- neoromantique 1y ago[flagged]
- ilvez 1y agoHalf a year ago I had a slim hope that they want to at least offer some solution to people who care about not supporting invasion, but now every month my hope gets ever smaller..
- neoromantique 1y agoI really liked their stated mission and product, but since it depends so much on trust, this ethical inconsistency really kills it entirely for me. I have been active user for over a year prior to initial scandal, but I no longer can trust leaderships judgement, and least I can do is inform people in comments when Kagi inevitably is brought up on HN, that part of their money would go to Yandex.
- mm263 1y agoLinks?
- neoromantique 1y agohttps://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19 https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
- handedness 1y agoThe world is a complicated place, Hobbes: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russian-pipeline-gas-exports-europe-rose-10-mm-may-data-shows-2025-06-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russian-pipeline-gas...
- neoromantique 1y agoMy country has cut all fuel imports from Russia on May 22, 2022. And it is weird to compare something you as an individual have very limited control over with directly spending your money with a company. I believe it is important to inform people that part of their spending is going into Russia directly.
- skarat 1y agoGood for them. Used it for a month or so a while back and liked it, just didn't renew my sub. I really like their browser, Orion though. It's still rough, and crashes at times but it feels like a great non-chromium option for MacOS.
- SietrixDev 1y agoThey also announced a Linux version in early 2026.
- stavros 1y agoI feel like I'm the only person who doesn't really see the appeal. I have subscribed multiple times in the past, including a free trial for three months that recently ended. It wasn't bad, but when the trial ended I just switched back to DDG and kind of... didn't think about it again?
- patchymcnoodles 1y agoThen maybe it is just not for you, completely fine :). I used DDG in the past, but didn't see a big improvement (it is better than Google though). Kagi really changed it for me and so I'm a paying user since a year or so.
- climb_stealth 1y agoFor me part of it is supporting a project that is worth getting behind. I like that someone goes against the big ad-supported players in a field where it would seem impossible. Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top. I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
- jessekv 1y agoI have DDG as the default search in Safari (because Kagi is not an option, maybe it requires profit sharing with Apple?) and I often end up using DDG out of convenience while being a Kagi subscriber. I agree there is not a lot of differentiation between stock Kagi search and DDG. DDG still has a few ads but it's not that annoying, perfectly usable. Kagi's assistants are pretty interesting though. Recently I asked it to find back a post that I vaguely remembered. It managed to generate a bunch of Kagi searches with different keywords and narrow it down to an old tweet.
- smodo 1y agoThe recent blog post discusses moving into the email space and suggests some interesting uses of LLM’s for handling mail (sorting and labeling rather than writing). I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with the Kagi products so far and would probably consider their e-mailservice if it’s as good. However the hassle of switching email providers is of course around 100x the hassle of switching search…
- jwr 1y agoI'm a happy Kagi user. I really enjoy using a search engine that is just that: a search engine. No ads, no sponsored results, no junk, no garbage. Just the results that I'm looking for. I am tired of being advertising meat, and I'm willing to pay to use the services that do not waste my time.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoY-axis starts at "48,961" -> marketing (of course). Not taking you seriously.
- SamFromSpace 1y agoThe button right underneath toggles between “Recent” and “All Data”.
- akarlsten 1y agoPresumably that's how many users they had 2 weeks ago, as indicated by the giant "Recent" indicator and the dates? You can always switch to "All Data".
- KingOfCoders 1y ago1.) Not sure how that relates to the non-0 y-axis 2.) Switching to "All Data" also doesn't set the y-axis to zero, but to 6,840. Having an y-axis set not to zero is in the majority a sign of people who want to inflate growth.
- freediver 1y agoOr people who didn’t care about growth at all, only to start measuring it at 6840 customers. Hint: It is the latter :)
- KingOfCoders 1y agoHint: This has nothing to do with a zero y-axis, why would one need to have a zero value to have the y-axis start at zero? The reason to have a non-zero y-axis for time series is to amplify changes, e.g. the changes might be to small to see with a zeroed y-axis. Or you have ups and downs and want to compare them, with a zeroed y-axis again the changes might be too small to compare. Whenever you want to show growth, a non-zero y-axis is usually a sign that the aim is to overstate growth, because we as humans estimate growth by the steepness of the graph, not by the numbers. A non-zero y-axis creates a much steeper graph and thus growth is perceived much higher than it is.
- treeshateorcs 1y agoi wonder what happened on may 29th when *teams* hit a plunge
- moebrowne 1y agoCheck the y-axis scale, the 'plunge' is from 185 to 183
- ed_mercer 1y agoOnly 50k? They need to step up their game and scale more aggressively. I want them to kill Google. At this pace I’m afraid it will be a losing battle.
- 28304283409234 1y agoAnd when they release Orion on Linux I can FINALLY pay for a browser (again). IMHO Kagi is doing what I expect Mozilla Foundation to be doing.
- geraltofrivia 1y agoBased on my limited understanding, making a rendering engine (what mozilla folks are doing) and making a browser using existing rendering engines (what firefox is, what probably-but-im-not-really-sure Orion is) are different in terms of complexity by orders of magnitude.
- 28304283409234 1y agoI know. Everyone here knows. This relates to my comment how?
- iLoveOncall 1y agoYet if you were to base yourself off of the attention they get on HN you'd think it's the largest search engine in the universe. I'm tired about seeing all those posts about Kagi. I have yet to see a single example where it outperforms Google. People just don't know how to search. Every time someone claims Google is becoming bad, ask them to share what they're looking for and how they search for it, and where the problem lies becomes glaringly obvious.
- nicce 1y agoA similar take would be that why use LLMs to query information since we can use normal search and still find the results. Defaults and usability matters.
- iLoveOncall 1y agoThat's probably the worst analogy one could make when trying to show that one system is superior to another when we all know and experience daily that LLMs hallucinate search results all the time and are completely unreliable. My original point is that Kagi is NOT better than Google at search.
- nicce 1y agoI think you missed the point - for masses the correctness matters less than average usability and efficiency of getting results that are good enough most of the time.
- yesfitz 1y agoCan you share some examples of obvious problems with how people use Google?
- iLoveOncall 1y agoJust searching with extremely poor keywords is the most common problem I've noticed. It's a search engine, not an interpretation engine. Also simply bad faith. Check my response to this article and the thread of comments that ensued for a pretty recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829655 I have never ever had a problem with search. If I can't find something on Google it means it simply doesn't exist.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoI don't know what I'm doing wrong but I use google exclusively and have never (as in - not once) seen a Pinterest result.
- iLoveOncall 1y agoFor text search it never shows up, but in image searches it's a real plague. To be fair I think Google has lowered their position a lot in the results because it used to be that it would be 80% Pinterest results and now even in images it's only a few here and there. I think they understood that everyone hates that website.
- FergusArgyll 1y agoThat explains it! I don't use image search. Thanks, I thought I was going crazy. ..
- zkanda 1y agoI used to be a subscriber and would like to support the project, but the noticeable response latency is a problem for me (Spain). I’ve tried both my desktop PC and iPhone, and the result is the same unfortunately.
- Aldipower 1y agoI've used Kagi the last month and was quite satisfied. But the payment model (not the price) is completely PITA. I did a pre-payment of 15 $ via PayPal. First this options is extremely hidden. Second after I reached the limit of searches for the month, I could not get additional searches for the month, but had to wait for the next. So I was blocked with searching and I moved back to Google. My left-over 7$ are rotting there now.
- gonzalohm 1y agoYou can use the remaining credit the next month. But why would you add $15 as credit when you can get unlimited searches for $10?
- Someone1234 1y agoBecause some people prefer Pay-Per-Use rather than yet another Subscription. I am one of them; even my cellphone plan is Pay-Per-Use which can both be cheaper or more than a subscription, but in both cases I am in the driver's seat.
- gonzalohm 1y agoBut adding credit to a wallet is not pay per use. Utilities like electricity are pay per use. I also prefer that, but I don't want to randomly guess how much money I need to put in a wallet for a service
- always_imposter 1y ago[dead]
- bitdeep 1y agoUsing it as my default search for my browser and mobile (on mobile is abit hard to setup). Migrate fully, after Google first search turned into a cesspool of scam AD's and SEO crap.
- Haeuserschlucht 1y agoKagi is something to be paid for that others offer for free. All of them collect your data, regardless what they claim. So just go with the free versions.
- miloignis 1y agoDo you have any evidence that they collect your data? They go so far as to have an API to generate cryptographic proof of subscription tokens without revealing your identity for searching when using Tor, etc ( https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html ). Beyond their data collection stance, which I believe, their results are better and worth paying for because they don't have all the extra ads and crap shoved in them and allow you to modify your own website rankings, etc.
- Haeuserschlucht 1y agoFirst of all I have to ask: Do you work for them? Be honest. As long as I cannot access their data, cannot see their systems on a continuous basis, they can collect my data. The same applies to DuckDuckGo and the same applies to VPN services. So at Kagi they are aware of Tor, they are aware of the Dark Web. If you even talk about this on your website, of course you find ways to circumvent privacy there. I tested Kagi and my experience is the results are even with or worse than what other services present like Google or Bing or even Perplexity. And if you don't like advertising, just use an ad blocker. I'm so surprised that so many people don't seem to do this and they always complain about ads. Just use an ad blocker already. So they allow me to modify my own website ranking. Well, if almost nobody uses this website, that's pointless. Besides, if I could modify my website ranking, so can everybody else. And now we are back to search engine optimization.
- miloignis 1y agoNope, I'm completely unaffiliated with Kagi, just a happy customer for a year and a half or so. I don't understand all of your objections, but it sounds like you're operating in a very strict "if I can't verify it myself continually, then I don't trust it at all", which I think is far too black-and-white. Trust exists on a scale, is built up slowly over time, depends on your threat model, etc. I don't want an adversarial relationship with my search engine where they try to show me enough ads to make money to stay afloat and I try to block enough ads so my experience isn't miserable - this isn't any fun, and one of us will lose. On the other hand, I can pay Kagi, and they are incentivized to give me the best service possible so that I continue paying them and recommend them to others. It's far more positive, and a better outcome for us both. And it's working - I have a much better experience on Kagi than Google or elsewhere, and I have kept paying them and recommending them to others entirely organically - I don't think there's even a referral program, I'm certainly not using one. They say they don't collect my data, and why would they? They don't show ads, and if anyone ever found out they were lying their paying customers would leave in droves. Furthermore, they take actions to back up their claims, like integrating the Privacy Pass feature. Finally, they don't allow you to modify your website ranking for others - they let you modify how other websites rank for you. You get to personalize how you want websites to be ranked for you when you make a search, which is a very cool feature. Anyway, if you tried it and didn't like the search results, no problem! You can use something else. I don't think that your other objections are valid, though.
- submeta 1y agoHappy customer here. This is what Google used to be years ago. Love it.
- pshirshov 1y agoIt's good but way too expensive. 10 searches per day for $5/month doesn't feel fair. Local deep searches with ollama are comparable in quality and cost nothing. Also, half of their premium model list is laughable - 32/70b models can be run locally without an issue.
- muzzy19 1y agoWe desperately need from Kagi: 1. Change jurisdiction to Switzerland 2. Build (or at least partner with someone) to build an independent index 3. Extend services to paid e-mail, collaboration and other tools of a whole ecosystem. I'm ready to pay!
- tylervigen 1y agoI love and respect what Kagi is doing and I was a customer for years, but I recently canceled my subscription. I found that have two main use cases: 1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced. 2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search. I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me. Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.
- zamalek 1y ago> less SEO spammed I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).
- abtinf 1y agoFor your first case, why not use the “?” operator to trigger an LLM response, or use Kagi Assistant (which gives you access to pretty much all the different models you might want to use)?
- tylervigen 1y agoThanks. I did not know this, but it triggers a different problem. Many of my LLM queries are for work. My company has data protection agreements with OpenAI, but not with Kagi. These matter more for LLMs than raw search. For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.
- mbarria 1y ago1) Kagi has had AI features for quite a while. And you get access to quite a wide variety of LLMs for the price. 2) Yeah this is the one thing I still use google for. Though they did recently update Kagi maps (a weeka ago I think?).
- zipping1549 1y agoBeen a satisfied customer for more than a year now. Pretty worried about sustainability of the service.
- looshch 1y agoand they would reach this milestone faster if they haven’t spent money on silly t-shirts and AI which made some folks to lose their faith in Kagi. I personally quitted my subscription after this
- jemmyw 1y agowhy do you care about these things exactly? Please explain a bit more. You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts? That's not exactly like "I like the company products but I don't agree with them signing up for military contracts". It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on? On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there. I'm pretty pleased with their AI implementation. In search it only activates if you append a question mark. Their assistant is a pretty good alternative chat interface, it lets you choose the model. I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models. It has probably fallen behind the tooling others have at this point though.
- looshch 1y agosure > You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts [...] It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on? i like the service, but spending money on t-shirts seems unreasonable to me. I'm sure there are a dozen things which would benefit from the money and time which were spent on manufacturing clothes. From their own blog post [1]: > The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database which sounds to me like not the best way to spend the company's time also: > why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts all their answers to that question they asked themselves in the same blog post seem silly to me. Go give bonuses to your employees, upgrade devices, make a company event, etc > On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there absolutely not! If i want an AI search result, i go to an AI provider of choice. Again, i don't think that should be their focus > I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me — i cancelled Kagi subscription because i use claude as a search engine [1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
- dakial1 1y agoOk Hackernews, you convinced to test it out. But from my first days experience I can safely say that 300 searches a month is a low number for entry pricing. And given that I'm in a developing country, the entry pricing is also not cheap enough. But I'll keep pushing for a couple of months.
- mdrzn 1y agoWhy is this page translated by default with no indication that I can change the language? Very weird.