Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.
Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.