I really like Kagi, but I'm starting to get that same sense of anticipatory melancholy I used to get when I found a really good drug dealer back in the day - this product or service is fantastic, and I'm very happy to be able to give it money, but I recognize this is a short term affair and some day I'll be back to having to search for it again.
I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.
Kagi founder here. I like simplicity too, but if that is the only thing I cared about I would have never attempted to build a paid search engine.
We started working on the browser before we started working on search. There were many browsers and search engines before us, and all of them failed because you can not compete with an ecosystem company (Google) with a single product. If your customers use your search engine, but then use Gmail and Chrome, your main competitor has means (friction) with them to attempt to win them back over (and you are paid, they are free!) if you ever become more than a nuisance.
This is why it was clear to me from day one that we need to offer a hollistic replacement for big tech for consuming the web - and search, browser and email (yes, we are building that too) account for 99% of consumption of the web.
Yes, it makes our job everything but simple, but without it we will not survive long term - I am 100% sure. (and in the meantime generative AI showed up and made things even more complicated)
I still love my job and the challenges it brings, every single day. While we live as a company in a complex environment we try to remove the complexity for our customers and make high quality products. I have pretty high standards for browsers and have been using them for almost 30 years - and Orion is by far the most powerful option on the market (speed/energy/privacy/features). Inviting you to give it a try.
I’m personally a Kagi early adopter and Protonmail user for all other standard GSuite product replacements. I find this arrangement perfectly smooth and painless, and never once wished that the services that I get from Proton in any way interacted with the service I get from Kagi. It’s not clear to me at all that duplicating the google product spread would be the best way to extend the value to customers of Kagi search.
I would like to be able to see my emails appear in search results when relevant. Also would like to be able to quikly search the web when writing emails. This is not rocket science but for this you need deep integration between email and search. For some reason Google didn't do this in 20 years although perfectly capable of.
I think it depends on what you're trying to do, and I also think the landscape is different right now than it would have been 5 years ago.
I'd actually view the browser as a more difficult market to crack than search, because there are plenty of decent free options that have not obviously succumbed to the lure of advertising revenue yet. You're also always playing a "red queen's race" with the browser market where that friction you mention with Gmail and other google properties can be used to push people away from your browser. Similarly, for email, Fastmail and Proton are both fine answers for what to do without Google, and both cover a wide enough spread of the market that I'm not really looking for alternatives (and, relatedly, running an email service _sucks_ - if you haven't hired someone with large-scale public email service experience yet, you absolutely need to do so, because it's one of the worst problems on the internet).
The search market is different - you are, to the best of my knowledge, the only actual paid search engine out there, which means you're the only one whose interests align with mine and the only one who can pursue a product strategy of actually delivering the best available information to me.
This is part of why I'm concerned about dilution of focus - as a dedicated Kagi subscriber, the reason I'm here is because you offer good search aligned with my interests, and that's why I'm going to keep paying you money. The additional products in the pipeline weren't requirements to get or keep my business, and I suspect it's the same for many of your subscribers. I trust you to run your business - you've created a great product that I'm happy to pay for, so you've earned that - but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
> but please make sure you keep the search product top of mind and make sure that's a sustainable business.
Having best web search in the world has been our bread&butter from day one. This is what so many people pay us for!
Great search becomes even more important in the age of agents - model quality is converging to the same spot across frontier models and what will make great answers different from mediocre ones is the quality of search fed to them. We are currently testing v2 of our Search API with select partners and plan to make this generally available soon.
We 100% intend to continue to dominate this and we heavilly invest and innovate in search quality space. A major announcement soon.
Many customers do, and in fact Orion feedback forum [1] is more active than Kagi feedback forum [2] (we do not have any telemetry and all product input is given directly by our users).
While Kagi has "only" about 50k customers, Orion was downloaded more than a million times last year and continues to be a major distribution channel and entry point for the Kagi eco-sytem. (you are not seeing any ads for Kagi right? Our products are our "ads", that is how we grow + wonderful user community)
And while you can use Kagi in any browser, it is a really nice experience when you use Orion (and it will get only better as we build more integrations). We are also aware about cross-platform users - which is why we are also developing Orion for Linux as the next platform, with more to come.
Not sure what point you wanted to make by linking to the comment - happy to address it after clarification.
How do you plan to solve sync (bookmarks, history etc..) when going cross platform? iCloud makes things easy when it's just Mac/iOS, but that won't work for Linux.
I use Linux at home, Mac at work, and have an iPhone, and very few apps look native and work seamlessly across all 3.
You indicate wide extension compatibility. This is more of a thought experiment (by virtue of inbuilt adblocking), does - or do you hope/plan for - the likes of uBlock Origin work.
I couldn't agree more. The model of trying to support 3rd party extensions but not having full compatibility puts Orion in an awkward position. I would consider creating a Vimium replacement for Orion but where would you publish it? Firefox store? Chrome web store? Seems like you'd just have to distribute it as a zip that the user would need to manually import and manually update.
Besides Vimium, I generally experience enough bugs with other extensions or the browser itself that I just wind up not using Orion, despite following development for many years now.
What they're trying to achieve with Orion is very admirable but they simply don't have enough resources to pull it off. Making a browser is hard, making a cross platform webkit browser is even harder, making a cross platform webkit based browser that supports Firefox, Chrome, and in some cases Safari extensions is yet even harder.
Agree, either Vimium or Tridactyl or some other form of proprietary Vim bindings. Nothing feels quite as bad with browsers as programming with both hands on keyboard, poppping into the browser for a quick search and having to quick on stuff
One of the extremely stupid reasons kagi needs to develop a browser is because ios safari prevents setting kagi as the default search engine, so they have to do some terrible hacks to get it to kind of work.
I really hate that you can't set the default search engine easily like in other browsers, or that you can at least easily submit your company to be included in the defaults.
But with the Kagi extension all my searches are always redirected to Kagi on both Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS so I don't really see this as a real blocker as a user.
I understand that this is an onboarding problem, but for a technical user that's really not something preventing me from using Kagi (Like the other comment mentions).
That and Apple anti-competitively preventing non-Safari browsers from using Safari extensions, despite all iOS browsers being essentially Safari under the hood.
I don't remember the last time I used Safari on iOS, but once I started using Kagi, I was naturally drawn to Orion and that's been the best browser experienced I ever had on mobile.
The included ad-blocker being a big factor in the great UX.
That seems wild to me, but admittedly I don't search from the address bar at all. Is setting your preferred search engine as your homepage and opening a new tab to search really such a huge burden?
Yes. I do not tend to launch new tabs. I almost always use a single tab for browsing. Only when I need to keep something around then I launch a new tab to preserve the old one.
That means the address bar is my main interaction with the browser.
I went through the same thing with Dropbox. I loved how simple it was initially: just a folder that syncs. Then they started adding all sorts of "enterprise" and "family" features that cluttered up the simple use case it satisfied just fine for me.
I understand that businesses need to expand and innovate. But it sure is nice to have a rock-solid reliable tool that just works long-term; something that you can depend on without it suddenly morphing into a weird new thing after you've built up skills and processes around it.
Kagi and Orion both entered public beta at the same time[1]. Even if they didn't: it kind of seems unfair to indict this as an additional ambition. It's not as though browsers and search engines have an exotic relationship, and there's pertinent strategic threats that operating a browser protects against.
I would continue to pay Kagi $10 a month forever for exactly the product I signed up for - I have zero additional product wants or needs, zero additional ambitions for the service, zero things I'd like my money to be going to other than sustaining a high-quality service that solves a need for me. I don't need or want the AI features, I sure don't need a browser, and I'd really like all of this manic product energy to be going towards the core product so I can continue to enjoy it for the foreseeable future.