> Worth the $5 for me
Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.
They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.
I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.
I have the habbit to serach for words to verify their spelling. Very costly habbit when i got kagi.
When i do actually use it for search; it's amazing... assuming I've not already burnt my quota.
I'm not sure if "habbit" was a deliberate misspelling here, but regardless I think it makes the comment better! Lol.
... Darn. (read my username)
onelook.com works for this usecase. Allows pattern searches, and can set it as a custom search engine.
> OneLook scans 16,965,772 entries in 805 dictionaries. Use it to find definitions, related words, quotes, names, lyrics, colors, and more.
$10 is nothing if you're searching that often to no longer be the product.
https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
Agree the $10 plan is so worth it as to be a complete non-question as to whether to renew whenever it comes up.
Also, super cool link, thanks for the share.
One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.
That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.
Pretty much sums up why Google’s business model changed. Everyone wants good search, few are willing to be even $10/mo.
You know how many things are asking for "~$10/mo". People don't have the purchasing power they used to, and everything has a subscription model. Firefox with DDG is good enough.
As they said, you wouldn't pay $10/month for search. This is why free pay-with-your-data services won. Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
> Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.
(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)
Kagi support zero knowledge search through a Firefox extension and Mullvad supports zero knowledge VPN by putting cash in an envelope with your account ID written on the outside.
I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits. Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).
The US government knows everything though.
Sure. I’m not saying you should pay for search just saying it is not economically feasible to monetize it directly. I pay for Kagi, but that makes me part of a very niche market.
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If they charged a newspaper price for it per se (like $1 a month), Google would be rolling in cash with as many users they have.
Newspapers are not $1/month.
And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.
You are worth much more than a dollar. Each search is worth between 10 and 90 cents. If Google shared that with the user people would be happier
Google kept increasing its profits since then, and it was one of the most successful businesses out there way before they changed the business model to become enshittified. The argument that their business model changed because people wouldn't pay for its services doesn't really stand.
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I do agree it's kinda expensive. I'm lucky enough that my employer pays the $25 plan for met because it includes access to many LLMs.
I pay the $10 and use assistant multiple times a day and never needed the fatter models since for coding I have copilot and Gemini
True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)
> because it includes access to many LLMs.
That is interesting, which LLMs? Asking as someone paying monthly Claude subscription.
A lot of them. Claude is a choice. Here is the list : https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
You can even choose a model for each turn.
My time, attention, and “brain” are valuable. Having aligned incentives with my search provider and control over the results it serves me through weighting is worth substantially more than I pay for unlimited.
Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.
FWIW Kagi has worked hard on their pricing over the last few years and has been trying different models. They're not "big search" the price is what it is so it can exist as a business. 100% fine to not be a customer obviously, but then you forfeit your license to complain about Google spying on you and ruining the web. Like they're trying to solve the problem. IMHO speaking just for myself I feel a moral duty to support them.
You can not find the value of 10 searches a day for 5 dollars and complain about Google. Yandex,DDG and Bing are major search engine choices.
Kagi has limitations like not showing sites with ads which many people with ad blockers don't mind.
What do you mean Kagi doesn't show sites with ads ?
They lower the rank of sites with ads often pushing them out.
Kagi lets you re-rank sites, and also lets you ban results from sites you don't like.
I agree on all your points. I'm just saying, that the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota. I'm sure they have done their research and maybe increasing it will cannibalize the $10 tier.
It's relatively rare as of late that I need to specifically find something on the internet, and DDG does not suffice, so I rarely exhaust the 300 Kagi searches.
Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.
The 300 searches a month work for me because I only use Kagi when I think it will give better results than others. And most searches are trivial so any free engine will do (like you have the website name and want the url).
The $10 plan is worth it.