I've been a big advocate of them, but they broke their promise to grandfather in users on original plans, they doubled their prices, and have everyone counting the number of searches they make. Until they get a reasonable unlimited price plan I wouldn't use them.

As the founder of Kagi, I want to address the recent changes and challenges we have faced.

When we made our initial plans, we believed they were both realistic and sustainable. However, the search market has experienced dramatic changes in the past six months, far more than in the previous 16 years. Additionally, we've been confronted with an economic downturn. As a small, bootstrapped business, Kagi has had to make some difficult decisions to adapt.

We were left with two options:

- Stick to the original plan, which would result in significant financial losses and potentially lead to bankruptcy within a few months.

- Adjust our strategy to ensure the survival and growth of the business.

While we are not pleased with having to alter our plans, we have done our utmost to adapt to these new circumstances. It's important to understand that there are only three ways to fund search services - through advertisers, venture capital, and in Kagi's case, users. That is the reality we must face.

We acknowledge that the rollout of these changes could have been executed more effectively. However, as a small bootstrapped team without a dedicated communications department, we have limited resources. I personally oversee crucial business decisions, manage a fully remote team, and supervise the development of complex software products such as search, browser, and AI solutions. There is only so much one person can do.

We would love to offer unlimited searches for $5, but the reality of the search market dictates otherwise. That said, we are continuously evaluating our pricing structure, and we may update it again as some costs, such as AI, have not been as high as anticipated.

We are determined to navigate these challenging times and maintain a high level of professionalism. We appreciate your understanding and support as we work towards a sustainable future for Kagi.

Thank you for building Kagi. I've been using it for some time and I really appreciate the product and your transparency. I wish I could use Orion too but the last time I tried I ran into a bug, and although we did interact over support I didn't have time to continue. I'm not convinced the world needs another WebKit browser but I can understand the frustration a search service would have with the existing browsers directing to competitors.

I've never used Kagi (only heard of it in this thread) and I'm writing to say, "I believe you." Business models are hard. I can also understand the feelings of the disgruntled; it always sucks to feel like something has been 'taken away'.

Thanks for making paid search for the masses (with funtioning filters, apparently) a reality. By the testimony of many here, your results aren't bad. I'll be giving Kagi a try.

Based on this thread I signed up for Kagi and migrated my devices to it a couple days ago.

I’m one that’s ardently against subscription culture in most cases but I have to say im quite impressed.

Im currently on the $10 plan. Not sure if im gonna moved to the unlimited but im definately on pace to hit my limit this month. I never realized how much I search. I do wish the 10 dollar plan had annual options. Even without a discount.

I’ve used ddg for a long time. But even still haven’t been a huge fan of changes and I am one that’s happy to support a project in any way that I can get behind and gain something from from. Either via contribution or in a case like this cash.

I hope you all find a path to sustainability.

By the changes in the search market, I'm assuming you mean the introduction of ChatGPT and the higher prices Bing is able to command due to bundling it, or rather the brand boost and raise of profit expectations at this time. Which would spell further trouble ahead for kagi and ddg going forward, wouldn't it?

You are correct, the ascent of ChatGPT and its impact on the search industry has been substantial. Fortunately, the swift commoditization of models (and rising pressure from open-source) is reducing their potential influence to pricing, quicker than we initially anticipated.

On the other handm, we were forced to reassess our approach due to the situation with Bing, which led us to invest further in alternative partnerships and strengthen our own infrastructure. And despite the challenges this transition presented, it ultimately instilled a renewed sense of optimism in our team.

The most difficult aspect of this process has been receiving emails from customers who felt let down by the way we managed the change. We are committed to learning from this experience and improving our communication and execution in the future.

Have you considered or are you working on building your own index?

I'm not in the space, but that seems to me like the natural way to avoid having your company brought down on a whim by Microsoft, in the long term.

... or even partnering with someone like search.marginalia.nu?

I'm actually serious. At least I think I check Marginalia more often than bing or ddg or google.

We actually do partner with Marginalia, through our Teclis index. Marginalia is an amazing project and I hope it continues to grow.

I guess you can't have it all. Either you are the product, or you pay for it.

I'm willing to pay but not $25/month.

Well if you wanted to support the idea of paying for your product, you could totally decide to limit Kagi to 10$/month, and switching back to a free (as in "you are the product") alternative when your credit is finished.

Now I'm expecting you to potentially say "I would pay 10$, but I refuse to have to go through the trouble of changing my default search engine twice a month", which brings me an idea:

Actually Kagi should maybe offer that option: after you're done with your monthly credit, they redirect everything to the free engine of your choice. That would provide an easy way for people to support them with the amount they are willing to pay, without having to change anything in their setup.

EDIT: already suggested: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...

$5/mo for 200 searches, $25/mo for unlimited? Loading more pages count as new search?

Does anyone actually pay that? It looks like something a real search engine would post on April 1st.

> Loading more pages count as new search?

I have not ever loaded a new page with Kagi.

I generally need fewer searches than with other search engines, between their general features, and customized ranking, they are just that much better.

That said, I’m also in the early adopter plan ($10 for 1000 searches) which is enough for me (unlike the non-early one, as I sometimes go over 700 searches).

Search has a cost. You can either pay for your searches and own your results or have someone else, a complete stranger, pay for your searches and have the results be in their best interest.

Also check: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/why-pay-for-search.html

I think it was Mark Twain who said about Web 2.0, "In every transaction where money changes hands there is a buyer, a seller, and a product. If you are not the buyer or the seller, then you are the product."

Unfortunately usually you are the buyer and the product these days even when companies say otherwise (e.g. Apple)

$25 per month for a service you use every day. Sounds fair.

If you save 1-2 hours per month not having to use a search engine that tries to trip you, that's a net win.

However, personally I use Google with a browser plugin that lets me hide unwanted results, and I find it works quite well.

Although I don't do much elaborate searching using operators etc.

The results I get with Kagi for researching technical topics are significantly better than I get from Google, so I can justify it as a professional expense.

200 searches per month at $5? Holy christ I might do that in a single day! I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

> I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/

Have you ever tried counting your searches? You may be surprised. I'm slightly above the 500/month.

Not the OP but I just checked my 3 months history and I'm at 800, 469, and 682 searches on DuckDuckGo and 466, 535, and 482 on Google. I feel like I'm a heavy search engine user and I'd have guessed more than this.

I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.

For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.

I completely agree with the fact that not everyone can afford paying for Kagi. However, I seem to read from a lot of people who could afford it, but find it too expensive.

The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.

So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.

I'm approximately in the 900-1100/month range.

Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.

Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.

Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.

My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.

This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.

I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...

I agree with the anxiety, that's also something I hate with clouds (AWS and similar). Though for Kagi it's counting my searches, so it's not like a bot on the other side of the world will raise my bill.

For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".

You can do that with Kagi, there is both a soft limit and hard limit you can set. Although we would like to go towards the future with no limits as soon as economics allow it.

Actually I just saw this suggestion which I think is very nice: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...

The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.

Wouldn't that make sense?

Oh I did not know that. I have the "legacy premium" (not sure if that's the right name) left for a few months, I guess I'll see that when I transition to the newer pricing plan.

But it's great that Kagi has that feature!

I personally have 519 in the last 30 days just on my work PC. I search way more at home, so I'd estimate that I do at least 1000 per month in total. And this is not counting the searches I do on my phone either.

If your browser tries to prefetch search results from the address or search bar then it might add up very, very quickly.

AFAICT Chrome (and hence other Chromium browsers) don't do this, and if you auto complete straight to a result from your history that doesn't count as a search engine hit either.

I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.