Just a datapoint, but I feel like I do a lot of searches… I’m always looking stuff up, and I’m also in the habit of using my search engine as a lazy form of autocomplete for urls. I apparently do about 700 searches a month according to Kagi. If I were on the basic plan, I think that would mean I’d be paying $5/mo. + $0.015/search * (700-200) searches/mo. = $12.50/mo.
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
Yeah, I similarly felt like I did a lot of searches every day... and if I had estimated my search usage I would have said easily thousands a month. But I'm also actually in the 600–800 range it turns out.
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
You are correct, Kagi current users are mostly from the remaining 1%. However that plan was made to attract the remaining 99% Internet users to Kagi (and the plan is more than sufficient for their needs).
I'm skeptical that those 99% would ever be interested in Kagi's value proposition at all. Kagi is a niche product in the contemporary context of ad funded free search engines, and it would have to survive until the other side of the adoption curve before it can reliably sell itself to the average person.
