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Ooof ... 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 payi
by moralestapia 1y ago
Ooof ... 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