I've been paying for Kagi for almost 3 years now but with the advent of LLMs (really in the past 3-6 month) my usage has fallen off a cliff. I really wish they included some level of API/MCP access so I'd like to continue to support what they are trying to do but every month when I get charged I think "Is this still worth paying for?".
I could just pay for their API directly instead of my subscription but I wish they'd meet (some of) their customers where they are.
I have been using their API/MCP tooling. If I remember correctly its still experimental but it does work. I have it hooked up to my OpenWebUI instance.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/section/mcp
Yeah, and this is the direction I'm considering going. I just wish they had a subscription plan where I could still use the web search but also get MCP/API access included (not unlimited).
The last 6 months I've averaged right around 300/searches while paying for the unlimited plan (the lower plan allows 300 searches/mo which is just barely too small for me). I wish they provided usage data back further. I'd be interested to see if I was much higher in previous years.
You can pay per year ($54 for 3600 searches/year) and see how far you can go in a year.
You could just not use LLMs and retain your brain function.
Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.
I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."
> I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change.
Shouldn't the takeaway here be that depending on poorly maintained libraries is a risk? Code is a liability, not an asset. The habit that modern web developers inspired of depending on a new library for everything before ever thinkng about the problem first is bad actually. GenAI is a force multiplier for putting bandaids on bandaids and managing complexity, not extracting simplicity.
I don't use GenAI enough to lose entire days on it but when it "halucinates" fictional answers complete with broken citations and invented links that go nowhere, I am so glad I don't have to use this stuff for work.