Fair Pricing

> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.

Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.

AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.

A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.

> We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.

Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

more importantly it's kind to the users

(historically not so important to companies in practice, but it sure ought to be)

If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.

Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.

I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.

Then a particular show becomes a hit. And the company hasn't planned hardware for the spike in traffic because no one was using it before.

Yes a lot of people does this manually. But the services predate on the people that is too busy or lazy to unsubscribe and I'm afraid they are a much larger group.

Basically you want per stream pricing.

Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.

The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.

But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.

There are any number of plugins for all of the popular IDEs/text editors that let you use metered AI usage using an API key.

For VS code compatible plugins checkout Cline/Roo or just search for AI in the extensions.

I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.

My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.

I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.

On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.

As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.

I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.

It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".

According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.

    Date (UTC)   AI Tokens  Searches
    Feb 5, 2025  0          64
    Feb 4, 2025  0          43
    Feb 3, 2025  0          19
    Feb 2, 2025  0          24
    Feb 1, 2025  0          19

I found it way better simply because you can blacklist garbage SEO'd sites.

> Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.

What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not obvious to me.

From kagi.com:

> No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search.

So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.

That is what this effort is aimed at: sleezy status quo

It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.

That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.

The problem is not showing stuff from Yandex, the problem is that by paying Kagi you Yandex by proxy and that is an absolute red line for many people.

I did not know this about Kagi!

I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.

> You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022

Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.

- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.

- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.

- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.

- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.

All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.

I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.

It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.

What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.

fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.

Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.

Kagi doesn’t insert lies into the search results.[0] If that’s all it did better than Google, that alone would make it better.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766725

I honestly can't imagine Kagi being worse than Google. At minimum, Kagi lets me derank and ban domains I don't like.

Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use said thing.

How is them not supporting Safari not their fault?

FWIW, Kagi makes a browser called Orion that comes with ad blocking packaged in and works exceptionally well.

I too wish that the things I might spend money on were half the price.

To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).

I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.

Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.

The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.

Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.

I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.

that's called car rentals :)

See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.

Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.

Same here, hence why I remembered it (even if it is from 2022), it did resonate so much with my own experience.

Basically that is what this study went into great length to measure, at least the way I understand it.

Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.

Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.

Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?

What a needlessly toxic take.

> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.

> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!

> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!

> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.

> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!

Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!

> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.

[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.

The problem is that there are still huge amounts of services with awful dark patterns out there. There’s an instagram gym clothing brand called Fabletics which is £55/month for their vip tier. They auto subscribe you with a purchase (and when I say buried in the fine print, I really do mean _buried_ in the fine print). To cancel, you have to do it between the 1st and the 4th of the month, and it’s a multi page form where every page is a confirmation that is designed to look like you have unsubscribed . When services are still doing this there needs to be some rules.

Interesting take. I kinda take this a bit personal because I forgot multiple times about some subscriptions I had and I think I have my finances well under order.

I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc. I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.

If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.

People can leave their computers behind for vacations and try to not use their devices during said vacations or small sabbaticals, you know.

Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.

Who cares anymore in 2025? Maybe in 1999, but now in about 1 year we'll have agents that can manage subscriptions automatically.

Actually, I'm pretty sure OpenAI Operator can already do that, but I don't pay $200 for Pro so I can't confirm.

European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:

- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)

- Proactively investigate and check

- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results

I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.

I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.

This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.

That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.

...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.

My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.

We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.

Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?

Fines

Kagi also has solid AI features.

Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query results. By default it shows up automatically when it has high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it to show up by adding "?" to your query.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line research agent and "!code" is good and software development. Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current facts.

Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how well different models perform. They occasionally swap out default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a specific model if you want.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html

I think metered pricing makes sense for a service that's $10/mo (which the base Kagi w/ AI features is).

However, Kagi search unlimited is $5/mo. And, especially because of the whole "payment providers taking their cut" thing, I'd argue for services that are $5/mo or under, metered pricing doesn't really make sense.

Finally, I'd argue that this approach has other advantages over metering, even for higher-cost services:

* It's easier for devs to implement. Just one search needs to be recorded a month for an audit trail, rather than all search history.

* Keeping a search history for users is not needed at all, really (or, again, at most, one search per month). It's much better for user privacy.

* Most countries/states would have much more luck passing legislation forcing companies to implement this than metering, as well as enforcing it.

> Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?

The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.

Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.

Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.

For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.

Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.

When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.

Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it would just give you the result you needed in the first 3 results? Yeah, kagi does that.

In no particular order: Pinning results. Blocking Pinterest, the top few results aren’t spam. They are interesting.

No ads, no forced "AI summary", doesn't sell my data to anyone. There are many other quality of life features, I don't consider any of them personally indispensable except for the ability to permanently remove a site from results, which I have used a few times.

I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've never had any reason to try something else since I've started using it.

Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is not the only search engine with this feature though.

Up-ranking, down-ranking, and straight up blocking sites is a big one for me. No more scrolling past w3schools or geeksforgeeks for this guy!

Also, it's built in that sites with a ton of ads are down-ranked.

I don't use Kagi anymore but the main thing I miss is the absence of "Popular products" which is completely useless and comes up far too often when using Google to find retail products and black listing websites from the search results. Outside of that, the results were largely similar.

Quality search results while not making myself a google user. De-googling is quite important to me. Besides that, basically what everyone else said; it upranks or downranks domains based on my settings, the claude AI answers are pretty good, and the no bullshit interface.

We are rapidly approaching the point where using an embedding model to run over the whole internet will be the best way to rank search results.

At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in analogue computers is today.

yeah that's interesting. $5 for 35/day could be better as well

> Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.

The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.

The problem, for me, is not censoring/not censoring sources like Yandex. The problem is them sharing profit with Yandex.

I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a €20 euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.

It's ЗСУ (Збройні Сили України) in Ukrainian

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B9...

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...