Kagi – Introducing Fair Pricing

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:…”.

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

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 :)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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