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https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches y

• csomar 3y ago
  I was a customer for a few months until they decide to raise it. I do, on average, 30-40 searches per day. I'll need the $25 plan and while they are (subjectively) better than Google, I couldn't really justify the price bump.
• Sakos 3y ago
  They literally provide sources for those claims. I have no idea how you can say with a straight face that they're dishonest. They're very clear and transparent about how their plans are limited. It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5. They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges. Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do. edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.
  • stavros 3y ago
    The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.
    • 90-00-09 3y ago
      Why is it not representative? I was surprised by this recent Kagi pricing change but after reviewing my search stats I realized that their estimation is pretty on point.
    • rfrey 3y ago
      The GP quote was "But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are."
    • freediver 3y ago
      Kagi pricing page does not talk about Kagi users but Internet users, which Kagi is trying to attract with the $5 plan. Almost all of current Kagi users are in the other 1% category, but that doesn’t change the fact that vast majority of internet users search 2-3 times a day and that Kagi would like to attract them with this plan.
      • oh_sigh 3y ago
        But it does change the fact that 6 searches/day will probably not be adequate for the average kagi user, which they imply.
        • freediver 3y ago
          That is not implied anywhere? The copy clears says internet users and provides concrete sources for the claim. How would you word it differently?
          • cmeacham98 3y ago
            The obvious implication of putting that on a pricing page is that the average internet user accurately represents the average Kagi user. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it isn't, then there isn't really a way to "word it differently" - including the information at all is misleading.
            • 3y ago
• solarkraft 3y ago
  My IDE supports enough lines of code for 99% of jobs!
• unshavedyak 3y ago
  > They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day. Fwiw, i pay for Kagi and i am totally inline with their estimates. Maybe a pinch more, 7 instead of 4 atm. But at $5/m i can't complain, and so far (it's new to me) i've found myself not falling back to Google. I was on DDG for ~2 years and i constantly opened up Startpage (aka Google) and sometimes even Google. I've been very happy with Kagi, so far. Not sure i'd pay $20/m, but $5/m is a very nice value to me. I hope things work well for them. edit: Sidenote, but the first thing i noticed is just how damn fast Kagi is. Not really a selling point to me, but wow.
• 1123581321 3y ago
  It's completely honest. You don't have a sense of typical use. I'd argue search power users make fewer searches a day, too, but like you, and unlike Kagi, I can't back that up with sources.
  • kid64 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • freediver 3y ago
      (Kagi founder) Kagi never did bait and switch tactics and certainly doesn’t have a “history” of this. This is the third time you are accusing Kagi using the same words although I have addressed this already in a comment to you before [1] I would like to ask you to stop spreading this nonsense or at least substantiate your claims so that we can have a discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449
      • kid64 3y ago
        Great, I think we deserve an honest discussion about this. When you say "hey my product is $10/month, please adopt it", users are going to factor that pricing information into their decision of whether to adopt the product. That's the bait. Later, once you have persuaded the consumer to adopt your product, changing the terms in a way that are significantly less favorable to the consumer (the switch) has the appearance of fraud. You further misrepresent Kagi as some kind of expert in the search space, while presenting a bait and switch defense basically stating that you're only now learning the "realities of the search market". So, which is it? Isn't "we didn't know the realities of _____ market" just a cop out that anyone committing fraud can claim? Why not grandfather in your early adopters? I think if you could answer some of these questions in good faith it would go a long way -- as it stands you're just embarrassing your organization.
      • csdvrx 3y ago
        While you're here, may I ask you a question? I like duckduckgo but now I prefer bing, mostly for the bing chat inclusion. Yet I miss the ! shortcuts from DDG, and after trying it at a friend, I'd like to use Kagi too (so yes, I want everything and the kitchensync) Would you have a product that would also use ! shortcuts and do some bing chat like search on top of Kagi? By bing chat, I mean not just openai, but doing queries to augment the answer. I'd be happy to pay for it, especially if you offered an API to specify a few basics (ex: what is XX? Please augment your answer using results using this search query:" ")
• cetra3 3y ago
  ~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day. There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches. It doesn't quite sit right in the same way github actions charges per minute: The slower their runners are, the more money they make. And both of these scenarios there is no user agency to assist with that past a certain point.
  • endisneigh 3y ago
    To be fair to same disincentive exists with ads, and any timed work. Ideally you’d be paid per successful search but that’s an intractable problem.
  • runnerup 3y ago
    > they make more money if you have to perform more searches. Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable. Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan. The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.
  • jpalomaki 3y ago
    > they make more money if you have to perform more searches. I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers. Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, where you assume 80% of low volume users will cover the costs for the 20% heavy users
• hattmall 3y ago
  I don't know, it seems low, but it works for me, but I still just use Google for most things. Like most of my searches are simple things where Google is fine. Recipes, weather, easy queries. For more advanced stuff where Google doesn't work I use kagi with fair success. Like today I was looking for an obituary from 1843 and Google just kept giving me shit about the Ukraine War. Kagi worked! But also gave me some Ukraine War results, but somehow the most relevant page was near the top of Kagi but nowhere to be found on Google even with multiple searches.
  • levidos 3y ago
    So you essentially have to budget your queries to make sure you have enough. Which is unproductive. The "simple queries" should already be cached aon the server and should not even count to the quota.
    • freediver 3y ago
      To clarify, there is no limit on Kagi. Searches are 1.5 cents per search (after those included with subscription) and you can do as many as you’d like. Or get an unlimited plan. A lot of things don’t cost a search (bangs, reloads etc..)
    • presentation 3y ago
      I’ve been using Kagi for many months and similarly to the others, I actually haven’t found myself exceeding the low-sounding prepaid cap often. Weird
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  It also doesn't say what currency it's in anywhere on that page. Is that my local currency or (presumably) USD? That makes a very large difference to my price.
  • KomoD 3y ago
    USD
• freediver 3y ago
  (Kagi founder here) You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot). But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential. How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?
  • eipi10_hn 3y ago
    I'm currently in Early Adopter ($10) plan. If I move to $5 tier plan and move back to $10 plan in the future, which plan would I be at that time? Is it still Early Adopter?
    • freediver 3y ago
      Early adopter is a flag in the system that you can not lose (thank you for being one). Its perks will always be available to you.
      • eipi10_hn 3y ago
        Oh I see, tks for your explanation.
  • danpalmer 3y ago
    > How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest? I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service. As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that group because they won't pay for search, but for users who would pay for search they might see that tier and feel that the quotas are stingy and they're being forced up the pricing tiers for behaviour that to them feels normal. I don't know what your subscriber base looks like, but as an armchair spectator... I'd probably drop the $5/m tier and then emphasise that the "Professional" tier comes with "10x the number of searches that an average internet user makes", or whatever the multiplier actually is. Also it would probably go some way towards assuaging fears of running out of searches if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.
• jareklupinski 3y ago
  i hit my 1000 search limit yesterday, and my cycle is up in a little over a week. I was a little miffed, but there is a helpful button that just redos your search in google it was my first time using google search in a few months since i started kagi, but.... have google's results become better? maybe voting with our wallets worked, and google is rolling back some of their less popular recent ranking changes
• desro 3y ago
  FWIW I've been using Kagi exclusively since Nov 2022, and here's what my monthly usage looks like: Apr 2023 - 895 Mar 2023 - 1047 Feb 2023 - 650 Jan 2023 - 603 Dec 2022 - 1367 Trends much higher when I screw something up on my network! I have been asking GPT-* a lot of what I would have previously searched for. And there's still a lot of searching `+reddit.com` because they can't seem to solve search. I pay $10/mo and am grandfathered in as an "early adopter" with 1K searches. I would be willing to pay more because I've been so happy with it. It's simple stuff -- it respects and obeys my double quotes and boolean operators. If my query returns no results, I get no results. No advertisements, period. The ability to pin, raise, lower, or eliminate the rank of domains in your results. It's just nice to feel a modicum of respect as someone who's been using computers since shortly after they could read.
  • keyle 3y ago
    Yeah. It's just sad that it was what search was, for free, before. This idea that you search for things, and you find them, instead of paid per word shitty articles and ads. Nutty concept in 2023. At this point, the free options are so bad I'm considering writing my own. It won't do 50% of what the big ones do but it will do it well.
    • kalupa 3y ago
      Was it ever, really, free, though? you and I were never, really, the customer, ultimately
      • unshavedyak 3y ago
        Yea i hate this framing. Nothing is free and we should be wanting to move towards payment ourselves. Yea, i'd prefer "payment" to be the cost of locally running a server, but i'll take what i can get. The days of believing free is viable for any online service should be long gone. Hell it's difficult to even determine if paying for a service actually protects you from being the product - because often that isn't the case. However free should be a no-brainer these days. There is no free.
  • 3y ago