Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.
(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.
You can but its not only more effort and increases the price but also reduces privacy and anonymity because you introduce a possible point of tracking with most likely KYC exchanged BTC and a publicly viewable blockchain.
You can, but to retain anonymity you'll need to go through decentralized exchange (DEX). This is extra hassle, especially if you have never done this before.
In addition to what u/akimbostrawman said, I feel like doing that would undermine long-term privacy by slowing adoption of a tool (monero in this case) in favor of something less private.
I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto?
When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?
Lightning just isn't a good option as you first have to pay the expensive Bitcoin fees just to be able to use it... (And hope that you'll find a route otherwise you'll have to do it again.)
If $0.27 is an expensive fee then I don't have any answers to that.
Yeah routing can suck. First timers should use a lightning wallet with built in LSP support like ZEUS, BitKit, Phoenix, etc. Then routing is a non-issue.
People regularly overpay, so I'm not sure looking at average fees it the right lens. Monero is great, but it's trivial to get an excellent user experience with lightning nowadays that doesn't require custodians.
The reason people overpay is that it's impossible to foresee what fee will get you into the next block, so they overpay to not get stuck potentially for hours or more.
Not requiring custodians is just one part, having to rely on third-party services for basic functionality is another.
Nobody wants to use BTC because of high fees and at this point its less a usable exchange of value than speculative asset. I personally would only ever use and trust a online service advertised as private/anonymous if it actually supported a private and anonymous currency (like some vpns do).
Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level.
At the same time, privacy pass is a very foreign concept to me. If they are transferable between devices, one could generate a couple and resell them over some other medium (even in person).
We implemented Privacy Pass exactly so that you do not need to trust any claims we make but as a user have a (provable, cryptographically) mechanism that guarantees this, with one click, whenever you need it.
the privacy pass extension is open source exactly because users can then verify the process. and yeah, to prevent reselling they've made it so you can't get infinite tokens.
