I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month? That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.
I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable" products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable. The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).
If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you, it adds up to the point where we'd all have to start touching grass for most of the day while general purpose computation becomes more exclusively for the affluent. I mean maybe that's a good thing but it feels pretty radical from status quo
That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.
If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search.
But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.
> If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you
Except that it shouldn't. The software I use every day is not a service that incurs ongoing costs to the developer. A one-time fee is the correct model for that.
We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go?
If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.
More and more services ask for money -- really, it was about time they stopped pretending the VC money will never dry up, and I approve that they are finally waking up.
But notice the "more and more" part. $10 is nothing but we also have to take into account how many times we have to multiply $10 each month.
And that equation started becoming unfavorable for us the consumers.
I won't blame VCs but the 0% interest rate environment.
When money had no "price" to it, it made absolute sense to borrow as much as possible from the future, and thus delaying profits for growth.
That's why we start seeing this world change now, rates are no longer 0 and money isn't free. You have to pay now, and so you have to have some cash flow now.
I pay for Kagi and I honestly feel that I get more than my money's worth out of it. YMMV, of course. Maybe it isn't worth it to you.
But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my searches.
In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested in were almost entirely unfindable.
But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.
Kagi is one of those things that immediately clicks once you actually use it.
Then you do a quick cost benefit analysis: how much money am I really saving when I use a "free" search engine that is intentionally shitty? If it takes me 2 hours to find a solution to something that took kagi 10 minutes,I've effectively saved almost 2 hours of my time and money. I can actually be more productive. Less headaches and frustration too.
> But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.
It’s a trial, you get 100 searches for free, then you have to start paying.
I don’t think you can call it a free tier but it’s a nice offer to evaluate the service before paying.
I tried it for a bit and wasn’t happy with the search results, but I might try again though and use up my remaining searches.
I double checked because I was about to correct you, and you're right, but I could've sworn it used to be monthly (still low limit, but resets) so maybe GP remembers that too. Or perhaps it just wasn't as clear that it was a one-time trial before, and we both misread.
What's insane to me is that Kagi is so good for the relatively little funding they have. Maybe when they have the subscriber numbers of Netflix they can reduce their monthly fee (not that I even personally think they need to), but for now I'm quite happy to pay them for a good service.
I'm increasingly a big fan of very direct revenue models. I pay for the product. I am *not the product*.
It's not just search either, their summariser tool is great, their Mac browser Orion is really impressive, and their attitude in general - eg. promoting signal over noise in everything they do (see Kagi Small Web), is just extremely refreshing.
$10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area. I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition is very good. Every once in a while I’ll use a computer that doesn’t have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these days.
Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi’s API access. But until then I’m very happy to pay $10/month for greatly improved search.
People aren't always as money motivated as that. The founder of Kagi is pretty intent on making it work well. And given the way they're raising I don't think money is the pure driver, but making the business sustainable. I wouldn't believe they haven't had offers already.
Let's be real here, 10 bucks is what you spend on a not even very great sandwhich. It's not insane to pay that for what is one of the more important tools in modern life.
Its 10 bucks. For a tool that searches the sum of human knowledge. Your ancestors would be ashamed.
If you're paying more than 10 bucks for a sandwich, you're getting robbed. If you're paying $10 a month for technology that used to be free everywhere, and that worked in the previous millennium, you're getting robbed.
Would you pay $10 for the best sandwich in the world? It's just a sandwich, but it's the best in the world. Would you pay $10 for the best search engine in the world? It's just a search engine, but the best in the world.
I use Kagi an order or two of magnitude more than what I use the streaming services I pay for.
It's a small operation with no VC money to dump prices and subsidise it for you, it's very in line to what I imagine paying for under these conditions.
This is hard to argue. 10 USD can be a lot of money for poor people, especially those in less wealthy areas of the world.
I've recently trialed Kagi, was happy with my first 100 searches, so I went for the 300 option for 5 USD/month. Unfortunately, I used that up pretty quickly. What I often do is start a search, then do a better query. And so on. I went back to DDG (though I never see adds w/that).
It is unlikely I will stick to it though. I hate having to log in in private browser mode, and for me it is worth 5 USD/month but not 10 USD/month.
Btw, the dog is hilarious. And I don't even like dogs!
You can configure a private browser session link [1] which prevents having to log in in private mode. I use in on both chrome and Firefox on my desktop, and on Firefox mobile on my android smartphone.
Theoretically, you're not just paying for the lost revenue on serving ads and/or server costs, but also the lost revenue on harvesting your personal data.
Isn't it a matter of scale still though? Presumably search engine cost could be much less per account once you have as many users as Netflix has. Assuming a large chunk of the cost of Kagi is the quality and curating, not just sheer server OPEX.
If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search.
200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person.
So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.
If you really want to have a good option for ad-free search engines, you will need to pay more than what search engines could get from ad revenue. And this is a non-trivial amount; Google's ARPU is reportedly more than hundreds bucks. Given its scale, Kagi might be running at loss even with $10/month...
> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or
why is that hard to imagine? the fixed costs of a search engine are enormous, and Google has 1) coming on three decades of investment in sunk costs and 2) billions of users now.
> providing that much value.
that's obviously a personal judgement you have to make for yourself.
having a quite good search engine that is happy to just take my money in exchange for a useful service is definitely worth three coffees/month to me.
$10/mo was the price to lure in the masses years ago, they all cost more than that now for ad-free viewing.
In any case, price is not reflective of streaming's actual economics because those were either subsidized by VCs (Netflix) or are an arm of a corporate behemoth (Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros) that can afford to lose money there in exchange for customer acquisition.
I just don't get these coffee comparisons. I don't know about you but I get free coffee at work on location, and at home the coffee is reasonably good that a Starbucks is not worth it.
To explain the coffee comparisons, people like to buy coffee as a daily expense around the 3-5$. not exclusively starbucks, but it is a part of many people’s routines. so its a useful frame of reference for most people. hope this helps
Well at home you get the coffee from somewhere, compare to that? I buy a bag of I think 250g beans for £7.95 (about $10 I suppose, conveniently) and without travel I probably get through at least four bags in a month.
That's much more coffee that Kagi costs than if I was getting it at Starbucks, but it still puts it in perspective I think. (And the coffee tastes much better.)
> Since AFAIK there is one genus I just buy the regular ones.
That's correct, but neither 'organic' nor 'fairtrade' means that it would be a different (better) variety. Organic = not sprayed with chemicals for pest control for example; fairtrade = farm hands not paid exploitative rates (paid more).
(Not that I'm preaching you should care about either more, I'm a fairly price-driven shopper.)
In fact ceteris paribus in general you could argue you might expect that organic variety to be worse for taste, since pest/disease resistance has played a larger role in its selection.
I'm not sure that actually works in practice though, because ceteris never is paribus, it commands a premium, it's a somehow more discerning shopper perhaps/on average, so it's more worth choosing a nice tasting/attractive variety vs. the regular one selected for yield.
I agree. I just can't justify it. Been trying to convince myself for a while. Even if it cost $0.01 a search that's 10000 queries. Kagi is $5 for the first 300 that's very pricey for only 10 searches a day.
$10 I get the feeling is cheaper in the USA than it is in Europe purchasing parity or earnings wise.
If I had to choose, I'd probably give up Netflix before I give up Google, even if Google decided to fuck it and charge everyone $10/month for searches.
How much people are willing to pay for something is deeply influenced by the competitors' price point, which in search, is zero, because Google exists. Whereas Netflix's competitors (apart from piracy) are more or less offering the same deal.
You have to be specifically interested in Kagi's selling point over Google to want to pay for Kagi, rather than needing search in a general way.
Actually I think comparison between piracy and Netflix is a good example here. Piracy is free but it needs some arrangement and you go though sources that is not safe, spam and malware. This is true on case of Google searched which is full of ads (that sometimes phishing attacks) spam and AI crap now. Kagi makes it much easier to actually get what you want.
And as always you can't have your cake and eat it too. You will need to pick what is important for you.
This is a précis of how software gets so bad -- people refuse to pay for the value it delivers to them, so the software vendors naturally look for other ways to make money. And the advertising starts.
If you don't want enshittification, then you need to pay for the things companies build for you.
I also am getting value from Kagi and think their AI/Summarize is really good. The search lenses are also very cool, actually its like Google was before they silently deprecated all useful operators. Honestly I hope they make it as it really is a better way to do the web.
edit: So I pay 20 bucks a month and get the "early adopter" package which is all the AI stuff in beta and its amazing. I think it completely makes Kagi much more desirable. Its a lot of money but I don't use any streaming services anymore and honestly just learn stuff and mess with LLM's to kill time when before I was watching something. I guess its not for everyone but I am surprised its not an instant buy for [more people in the industry.
I live in Brazil. The individual plan is arguably expensive around the global south.
But the family plan amounts to 3USD/person/month! I joined a bunch of friends and paid upfront for the yearly plan.
I even moved my 70-year-old mom to Kagi search so she wouldn't fall prey to clickbaits and scams. The extra peace of mind definitely paid off. I am going to move more people to Kagi in the coming months.
The only "feature request" I have is that it should be easier to switch to Kagi. The quotation marks because I know it's not up to them, but to the FCC lawsuit.
Also, if anyone from Kagi is reading, thanks so much for the great service you provide.
But it returns the same results google does. I even asked people on here to give me the queries that kagi is best at. Even then google still returned the same results.
Like the OP said, Google's shittiness is a choice and one they can turn off whenever too many people look like they are about to leave.
What I like about it is the ability to bubble up domains that are more useful to me and also downrank or filter out the ever growing domains of seo filler.
The ability to rank domains up and down is the main reason I feel kagi is worth the price. A few coding sites are raised. Quora, pinterest, and a few other noise sites are blocked. It's like Google from the early 2000s when you could find what you were looking for on the first page.
It is slightly better search results compared to Google, but only just. The game changer in search is seeing the results without stupid ads. If they offered just that feature for $0.99/month, I would switch. Their current price is simply too high for daily use.
Google ads are inline and pose as search results. “Sponsored results” are a deceptive name for “paid advertisements.” The first actual result is often below the fold on modern Google.
Of course the act of visiting Google is the beginning of the monetization. It’s not just an adware company it’s a spyware company as well. This is why their service is free.
And some results from the GNU Guix mailing list. !guix searches with a custom lens[0] that I added for Guix specific documentation and resources like the mailing list archives, and the IRC log archives.
I can combine this bang with the quick summary feature (accessed either by adding !q to the search as well, writing a query that ends in a ?, or pressing the q button after loading the results), which is essentially the same as the info boxes that Google will add sometimes, except it only shows up on Kagi if you specifically request for it.
I have also mapped versioned documentation for some things to the latest documentation using url redirects[1]. I have also manually hidden or raised lots of sites that I don't care about or care a lot about. This manual curation makes it so your search results get better over time, without having something like Google try to deeply understand who you are and what you want to try to figure out what search results are best for you.
Kagi specific features have been very integrated into my workflow personally. I definitely find the subscription worth it.
to add another anecdote: I've been using it for a year and it is really good. less garbage in the results of the sort of searches I make, no ads, no tracking, no logging, a nice UI to affect my own personal search results in ways I prefer (banning sites I consider crap from results, up and downranking others based on my opinion).
most importantly, it's just a simple, clear business transaction: I give them money, they provide a search engine in return. no trying to make me click on ads, no trying to encourage me to use it or let it track me to make money some other way, no worries about how they manage to provide a service to me, no worries about what future management might do with the huge morass of personal data they have acquired.
every now and then I can't find what I'm looking for and try Google, and the vast majority of the time Google can't find it either. it's pretty sad that a tiny new upstart can actually replace the once formidable Google Search for me, but c'est la vie.
I’ve been paying for Kagi for a little while now. The biggest thing for me is knowing each search is independent of the next like a good unit test. It does not feed, as a signal into some algorithm. Any time the thought of canceling Kagi comes to mind, I think about the confidence of searching for really sensitive information, eg medical. I can’t do that on Google confidently.
The way I see it, Kagi can save me half an hour of searching in a month. Given that it's $10/month for unlimited, I need to make $20/h to break even. If I make more than that, the value proposition becomes better and better.
Anything that will allow me to do more work I will buy, because the more efficient I am, the faster I can make money.
Every time I write a search query like "best tool for X" or "alternative to X", I use Kagi instead of Google. Because Google results for those kind of queries tend to be SEO optimized articles where the first recommended thing is the advert. Or even worse, I get some sort of spam/scam sites that get paid to shill stuff. I think got conditioned with bad Google results to not do it for those kind of queries.
On Kagi, you can just use the 'forums' lens, which will include Reddit but also results from other forums you might not have known existed. It's my favorite lens.
Depending on what your main competitor gives you is a bad pattern. If it gets adopted enough, or somewhat Google see it as a threat, conditions will change, maybe for everyone.
Think in what Reddit did when seemed that ChatGPT was trained on Reddit content, they put a price to such 3rd party requests, ended a market of good frontend alternatives for it, some tools and bots stopped working, etc.
Google could do something similar, or poison/watermark the results sent to them or even put Gemini to be creative enough with the way it send back results to make very hard to parse to send an unified answer.
It is what is available now, and it may work, but it may stop doing so because things happening outside their control.
> I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.
This. As a portion of the global market I suspect Kagi's userbase is tiny, but the fact that it has become an actual viable alternative makes me hopeful for a resurgence in paid B2C services.
Think i'll finally give Kagi a try - also thinking about moving to Fastmail or similar.
The results are so ridiculous now i've actively begun hating them, that coupled with a short stint using Google Ads a few years ago and i'm convinced Google is a very, very shady company that i can't wait to ditch fully.
Docs wise i've begun to look up on GPT-4 a lot though instead of stack, official sites etc. so i'm already using search less in general.
I switched to fastmail from gmail a few months ago and I'm incredibly happy with it. I even got to keep my *@mydomain wildcard addresses, and the fastmail calendar implementation is not half bad.
Were you using Google apps for your domain (or whatever it’s called now)? And if, were you able to maintain access to your Google docs and other Google-based services (play, etc)?
I was not. I switched from an @gmail.com address. However, I think the real answer to your question is that your email address is your ID for Google services, whether its MX records point to Google or not.
The big surprise for me re: fastmail is how much better their UI and UX are. I was prepared to pay money to sacrifice usability to avoid gmail and have been happily surprised.
I was on Fastmail until Opera bought them. Looks like they have since bought back their company, but there wasn't a compelling reason for me to go back.
Glad to see Corey mention the Steward/Khan interview. Not only did she speak Peoplese, she pretty much sketched out (in the limited time she got) the main forces at work in the past 30 years of monopolization. Now, hoping to see FTC find their big stick.
I typically use a mix of Google and DuckDuckGo and this combination serves me well. I block all ads with uBlock Origin.
I tried Kagi and I like it but not enough to justify the price to myself. If they ever introduce a plan where they charge per query I may start using it more often. Also, I don't like the idea of every query being tied to my credit card details (Kagi claims to be privacy friendly but many companies do, very few really are, it's better not to trust such claims)
People have honestly forgotten that our economic system simply fails to deliver progress without competition. The system is based on transmuting the desire for money into better and better products, but in the absence of choice, this can’t happen, and so the products stay the same or get worse.
Just wanted to chime in, I have been using Kagi for a long time now and it's been the best change of life. If I am on another computer and I accidently google something, I cannot even believe the amount of sponsored links and shit at the top. I will be a happy Kagi user for a long time! (assuming they don't change it to much!)
This is simply false. There are millions of pages that may contain your search query, no matter how you word it. And a lot of them are SEO spam. Results ranking and giving the user the ability to filter further down is very important and can’t be done with „just“ the write question
At some level, I really want to like Kagi. It represents how things should work. Value for value. I don't have any particular opinion about the pricing. I don't have "fuck you money", but I don't feel like it would appreciably hurt me if I put off cancelling the subscription for a year or two.
The problem I have with Kagi (within the status quo) is that it attracts high-value users, and it exists in a system that refuses to settle for anything less than milking those users for every penny. It's not that I think the idea is bad or the founder is dishonest, it's that Kagi is ultimately asking me to believe that it can construct a vessel that won't spring a leak under the pressure of GOOG/MSFT/AMZN/META when they turn their collective eyes toward acquiring Kagi's user base. And I'm not ready to believe that.
As C.A.R. Hoare so aptly put it, "There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars.".
They aren’t asking you to believe they are going to make it long term. They are asking you to believe that this month they can give you more than $10 of value in exchange for their $10 subscription.
So you pay Kagi money to de-enshittify Google as Kagi is a meta searcher. That model can only work temporarily. If the userbase becomes uncomfortably big, Google and the likes will simply cut them off. Kagi must know this. So my take is they use your money to build their own indexers to at some point not need the likes of Google. And do this without using VC money as a safeguard against future enshittification. This is why the price is what it is. I wouldn’t be surprised that when they are done and decoupled from Google Apple will buy them and make it part of their services offerings.
I don’t understand what you mean. Kagi is its own search engine. It isn’t a “meta searcher.” It also searches other engines but has it own index. If Google cuts it off, it uses its own and the others.
> All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.
No examples?
> When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,
The Quote from the FAQ explicity says "anonymized API calls". This is obviously mean that they use official API provided by these providers. And that is part of the reason why they have some high per search cost they have to cover.
Assuming they use some form of this Google API[^1], they're surely paying for the results. What bothers me is that, by paying for Kagi then, part of that monthly fee is going straight back to Google, right?
> Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day.
It seems like that API has a limit of 10k queries per day, so I don't know if it would be feasible for Kagi to use and I thought most Google APIs were prohibited for use in a competing product.
Sure, that specific endpoint doesn't meet their criteria. But point being, they're getting results from Google, and almost certainly pay for them using my monthly fee
Google’s entire business is based on scraping stuff no-one asked them to so they can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it. The same applies to Facebook. The gall of these companies trying to “ban” public web scraping when they’re the prime movers in that domain is quite something.
> It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug.
> they [...] figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product
I think Doctorov is getting this entirely backwards; Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable.
To be clear, I think Google could (and probably has historically) spend more on improving search, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided that this isn't profitable for them, but I don't think there's anybody at Google who explicitly wants search to be bad.
Kagi isn't good just because it is good, it is good because it's small enough that nobody really optimizes for ranking high on Kagi.
> Google would love to provide good search results, but there's just one Google, and there's millions of people out there trying to make SEO spam. Most bloggers are just writing whatever posts they feel like writing, while content farms explicitly optimize for articles that rank highly in search. The outcome is inevitable.
I think it has less to do with that, and more to do with the fact that their primary business is advertising. That is and will always be their first priority.
> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.
>The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:
"I tried it. It was magic.
No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again. ...(contd)"
