And what matters to me is: that it’s enough to keep going, securing the service, and that the number is steadily increasing.

How do you know?

My napkin math says they're in red numbers, but let's see yours! :)

Profitable as of a year ago

They reached profitability one year ago, two years into their existence. It’s a cool company.

Edit: Corrected from two years to one year

~Buddy, we are still in 2025 ...~ (removed, parent comment corrected)

If they were profitable then why did they raise money again?

>inb4, to expand their business

If that's the reason, where is this expansion? Their growth curve looks exactly the same since they started ...

IMO they invested a lot of money into their AI efforts, so maybe they raised for R&D?

I want them to do well, it's just that I thought they already had a much larger market share.

They hired a technical architect and an email engineer, so the biggest expansion is clearly into email hosting. But I imagine that AI R&D continues. I hope they consider more agentic extensions than search.

I think Kagi is great. I also understand why most people don’t need Kagi. It’s not hard to see why most people aren’t interested in yet another monthly payment on top of all the other things we’re asked to pay for right now.

Well, unless you're working for government and next year's budget depends on this year's expenses.

Most modern people need search engines. And most people don't care about advertising and having their private data sold. And most of those who do are happy to use adblockers and/or free alternatives to Google that still show ads, but may or may not collect as much data about you.

So it is indeed a niche: People who want to pay for search and AI, when both of those are "free".

As for having an AI broker instead of getting it straight from the model companies: I think the economic incentives are better. I don't want bloated answers, just because the model companies make money per token. I want to either pay for each token, or pay a lump sum to somebody who optimizes the result for me and pockets the difference.

Which means I can’t embed Kagi Search or Assistant into my open source products because APIs are second-class citizens.

To be fair, it seems like this makes sense for them economically, and maybe it even makes sense for growing in the right direction.

But as someone who would rather use their API, it’s a pity Search and Assistant aren’t there.

Once I tried openrouter, I am not touching any subscription LLM providers.

Google/Microsoft/Apple "all-in-one" personal subscriptions are a different beast, because they charge well below cost.

As much as we like to complain about ads, we also aren't really prepared to fund things that aren't ad driven.

Frankly on the web, for me, ads are fine. For TV less so. I pay for streaming (no ads) and for sport (no ad interruptions) etc.

For search, half the time I'm clicking on the ad anyway.