Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

The thing still giving me pause is a lack of "bring your own model connection" between saas uh services.

If I already pay for Gemini Advanced (or OpenAI/ChagtGPT Pro), I then have to pay for it again at every service that offers a Pro 2.5 (or 4.1/4o) tier. I should be able to connect my Gemini Advanced access to any service that offers Flash and be able to upgrade. Signing up for a bunch of services is starting to feel like being triple, quadruple or more dipped. Similar to how I am annoyed seeing media content cross licensed to three streaming services and not getting a bill reduction when subscribed to multiple services with the same content.

I've paid for a monthly subscription with Discord for years

They also have ads in the app and they have other monetization features...

Having a good ethos before significant funding rounds is one thing , it is lot harder once you raise a ton of external money.

It is not big bad VC either, VC funding while demanding is still lot more forgiving than Private equity or public markets . It is nature of a free economy to be as efficient as possible which in turn makes it affordable and accessible to class of users who would not have been do so before .

Firefox on Android has an accessibility setting called "Zoom on all web sites" that gets around this. Firefox's reader mode would help with this as well.

It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites being accessible by default :/

Hey - One of our engineers has fixed this. Please try again!

I can look into it. Can you clarify what you mean? Article zooms in normally for me (Orion browser/iOS).

What browser prevents this actually? None of the browsers (even mobile) I just quickly tested just... worked? No extensions.

This has been bugging me as well.

You can open it in a new tab and zoom there.

I can zoom just fine on mobile Safari.

I can zoom in

Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447), hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0

ublock origin enable zoom in all websites

Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?

https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...

At least you got your shirt. I waited for many, many months, where I consistently checked to see if they were out. They happened to release them during a very short window of time in which I didn't go to my email; I never got to have the shirt.

I had to send them my address…for my free t-shirt ;)

The shipping companies seem to demand it from the sender.

But they never use it so just fill in a random number.

I suspect that Kagi’s price point might be a close approximation of what these services actually cost to provide without being subsidized by ad services and data harvesting; free search can only really sustain itself under those conditions. Heavy users who block ads have been getting subsidized by other users for decades now, and this has led these users to expect these services to be provided at an unrealistically low price.

I also use the $5/month plan, and the few times I have exceeded the 300-search limit, Kagi simply renews my monthly plan early.

For me it's just happened a few times towards the end of the month and I was happy with how they handled the situation.

I've been paying for the $10/m for quite awhile now and it's one of the better QoL subscriptions I have.

I’m usually cautious with subscriptions and regularly review what I’m paying for. That said, Kagi at $10/month has earned its place — been using it for 20 months now and it’s been worth every cent.

I'm curious about how you think about the "value" for a service like Kagi? What determines how much it is worth to you? I don't think that Kagi is for everyone, but, at least for my own internal model of value, Kagi comes out so far ahead, that I'm curious about alternate ways of thinking about value that don't see it that way (to be extra clear: I do not think that my view is the "correct" view or only view).

> I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300 searches isn't enough

Most of the population is well served with search funded with ads and tracking. Kagi is for the minority who don’t want that. I’m not sure there is enough if a market between 300 and some other number that would treat search anxiety just to satisfy those who won’t pay $60 a year more to relieve it.

$10/mo is very cheap for such a high-quality service.

I'm gonna guess you aren't their target audience, so you both win thanks to the filter of capitalism. $10 a month to avoid google and microsoft AND get a decent AI assistant is a bargain to me. Plus it's a small tech company trying to make a good product for a certain audience and I can dig that. I hope they succeed and become wealthy.

I agree. I’m on the $10 professional plan and honestly if I’d received an email offering this for an extra $5 per month it would have been a no brainer for me.

Please Kagi, don’t take too much of a haircut or let paying for this eat into the core search budget.

Are you outside the US?

Q: I can not access Assistant!

A: We are doing staged rollout beginning with USA, full rollout scheduled by Sunday, 23:59 UTC. This will include other regions and even the trial plan.

It's right there in the article:

> An important note: We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for ‘Assistant for All’ is scheduled to be completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.

You have to login first.

For some reason instead of redirecting you to login kagi.com/assistant redirects you to the wiki rather than a login page when you're not logged in.

Outside the US as well. You can get it to work now through a VPN. Not all models are available at the moment.

That's why I moved to a paid mail service myself. I used to have a free one, but it was always lurking in the back of my mind that they'd be selling me to advertisers. (Plus, the service sucked)

I tried, and Kagi is better in some aspects like ease to edit questions. Haven't seen any a downside yet, and the option of creating multiple profiles seems interesting.

As a user myself, I'm not sure. Assistant is a separate view so it's easy to never interact with it but yeah, I can see why that might be a work policy issue. You could try requesting that as a feature in https://kagifeedback.org. The team are quite responsive there and historically Vlad the CEO reads every post.

Curious is it no AI or no LLMs policy? Search has used some form of AI since inception.

Are you imagining one switch toggle that would disable it at the team account level (or individual account level - in which case it would theoratically still be opt-in and 'available' like it is now).

Genuinly trying to understand the UX of it that would comply with the policy.

Can you describe the why of the policy and if you are ok sharing the industry?

I am also curious if you have other restrictions on information sharing, API usage, and what reference documentation to use.

FastGPT & Kagi Translate have been available for a while, so if you have a Kagi subscription you've already had AI accesss.

Settings > Search > Manage search AI features

Has the option to turn off Auto AI feature.

It might be an good idea to post on their support forum.

I don't use the Kagi assistant yet, just the kind of AI response in search results. But regarding perplexity, I'm a little bit disappointed.

I started to use Perplexity like 1 or 1.5 years ago when it was really good in term of efficiency to find good results with an efficient interface, compared to chatgpt and co. But nowadays I find the assistant response to be not that good at all, with a lot of the links provided or the suggested follow up questions on the same quality as Google SEO top results or ads.

Despite having the paid plan or Perplexity, most of the time I try a request there and then still go to chatgpt or mistral to ask the question again.

For Kagi, when I use the in search ai response, it is mostly good directly.

I tried both and use Perplexity. Perplexity is much more akin to native ChatGPT in which I can create "spaces" for my projects. For example, I just bought an RV and so I loaded up all of the PDF manuals into a space so the LLM can reference those things. Since a few months ago, Kagi is just thread based.

FYI - I use Kagi every day for standard search and love it.

Just typed this up elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726582

I've subscribed to Kagi for 2 years and subscribed to Perplexity for 2 months. I liked Perplexity a lot—in particular, I think its search AI search is faster and maybe a little better than Kagi's. But the lack of standard search and not being able to do non-search AI work led me to drop it and just keep Kagi. And then Kagi released Ki, their multi-step assistant, which is close to as good.

I use both but cancelled my Perplexity subscription.

Kagi is the better version of Google search, especially if you learn how to use lenses, bangs, and all these features. Kagi Assistant is great if you‘re happy with basic no-frills chat, i.e. no usable voice input, no image gen, no canvas.

Perplexity is not bad, but somewhat stuck in the middle between ChatGPT/Gemini and search. They provide sources for search results which are somewhat more spot-on than what I‘ve seen elsewhere. For example it could find EV chargers with restaurants for a trip I made along a route, which ChatGPT, Gemini, Kagi Assist failed greatly).

I found refining searches with Perplexity terse and it kept forgetting context once you started to reply. They have an AI generated news feed which lured me into more doom scrolling.

Also, be aware that Perplexity free-tier may collect data about you, which Kagi does not.

Tldr; Kagi is a superior search engine worth paying for. Perplexity seems good at queries that require context but quite expensive.

I use both. I only pay for Kagi because I have many models I can use and I can set up different contexts to use them in.

I rarely use Kagi search anymore and instead search via assistant. Both it and perplexity give me much better results than I get from a traditional search engine.

I've never been great at getting what I want from search engines. With assistant and perplexity, I type plain English with context and get what I am looking for a large chunk of the time. That's a godsend to me.

I've found things that assistant does that make it worth paying for. I often use perplexity but what I use it for (deep research) isn't valuable enough at the time to pay for.

I like the perplexity iOS app a lot and use it almost exclusively on my phone which isn't enough use to necessitate needing a subscription.

It’s the exact opposite. They are incurring a huge amount of risk with this.

6 hours ago most users didn’t have access to this feature at all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a well-built feature.

I’m paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was worth it just for Search. Now they’re giving me $17 worth of value for the same price.

Their margins must be razor thin, and they’re only able to offer this much value because they’re counting on most people not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave rebates, they’d go out of business.

As an existing happy subscriber to Kagi, this statement is illogical.

I currently pay for x. Soon I’ll get x + y for the same money.

That’s better.

It’s probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your subscription price if you don’t perform searches in a given month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other company with a subscription works.

It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.

The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.

Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.

This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.

Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users!". Their users are people paying for what up until now was just their search service. They're now rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off than you were yesterday.

If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.

I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.

That is a fair point. Considering the alternatives and realities Kagi is way too cheap for the life improvement it provides.

Is it fair enough to ask your favorite restaurant to lower the bill because you didn't eat the two last franch fries ?

Yeah I concur.

As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year I’m still being charged for renewing my plan even though I haven’t used a quarter of my allotted searches.

I don’t care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me. Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.

I’m seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the first time in ages.