Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.
So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
> A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX
For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.
Your mobile carrier and your fiber connection are great deals. That doesn't make $10 per month for Kagi an "absurdly high price". It's still a good deal. And they are completely different things.
I have very cheap electricity. If I compared other prices to my electrical bill, I couldn't purchase food, gas, Internet, or anything really. Because I'd say they are "absurdly high prices".
Well, the currency symbol might throw a hint. Because Americans of course use USD and rest of the world is pressured into using USD on online forums :)
Also the $22.83 for something that should be a round number.
Slapping sales tax on before the final price (but after the price in your head) is one of America's less charming quirks. No one else in the entire world does it.
That's what gets me too. I've been tasked previously to help a young relative with budgeting, and there were so many "It's only $x a month!" items we found that it was ridiculous.
It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.
These people either don't understand what living in a "world" means or are just too stuck into "but rest of you don't pay" that it will be hard for them grasp anything beyond what's written in stone on those grey surfaces for them. What they also don't understand that a small fraction of paying customers in some of such countries might or will outspend entire country's regular spending in the "paying world". They also don't understand that to achieve that unlike physical goods these companies don't have to open agencies, distributors, warehouses, retail chains etc to "sell".
PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.
Also, people in North America who don’t have tech jobs exist. I make pretty good money as a teacher, and it’s still significantly less than many of the parent posters salaries.
We’re talking median annual income of $10,000. I could forgive someone getting paid that not wanting to spend that $10 on an internet search engine instead of food.
Okay, but why single out Kagi? Everything is too expensive if you don't have money. Should all companies in the world stop making their products, except energy, food, and shelter?
And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.
> And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.
What on Earth? Ok I'll bite. $70 is about 1% of median monthly income for someone making $80K/yr, meaning it's perfectly fine for somebody with the median US income, by your own logic. Would you pay $70/mo for a search engine?
And no, no one should stop making their products. No idea how you'd come to that conclusion after reading my comment (that said, companies could definitely stand to introduce regional pricing).
If the search engine offered $70 of value or more, I'd pay that, why not? Provided I had that money to spare. A bicycle is more expensive than that, but I don't blame bicycle makers if I can't afford a bike, especially if I don't want a bike.
> In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."
I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.
Even in the US, which is already very HCoL, I think you seriously underestimate the number of households who've either never had who have cut household Internet. Lots of households where everyone's Internet access is on smartphones via MNVO mobile carriers, typically on $10-$20/mo/line plans with 5-25GB/mo/line.
$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.
Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.
I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.
Enable Safari suggestions, and it will suggest the website you're looking for most of the times while typing in the URL bar, and you don't need to bother with a search engine for those cases.
Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't.
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.
That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.
Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.
If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.
Thank you so much for the mention! Uruky co-founder, here. Let me know if there's some specific feature you'd like to see added (email or a reply here is fine), so we can evaluate!
I would maybe amend that to the pricing page, I also thought "long-lived API tokens" referred to the DNS updater functionality, not the management API.
And if you spent more than 5 seconds thinking about this you'd realize that 99% of Firefox users don't know or care who Brendan Eich is. The only one making any moral argument here is you.
Well the guy running Brave must’ve had absolutely nothing to do with Brave’s Adblock engine going into Firefox, so I can see why you’re acting so smug. After all, why would the guy involved with Brave be involved with Brave’s thing going somewhere other than Brave? Maybe it’s just random evolution! Excellent point, friend. I can tell you thought it out.
There are other countries and coalitions in the world that aren't the United States. Humanity fought and ended wars for thousands of years before the United States ever existed.
Most of the countries and coalitions you're alluding to have no functional militaries or actual interest in doing something about the war. They do strongly condemn.
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