Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing

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I wish they'd offer an llm free version with no cap on searches. Their products are too expensive and it feels like it is mostly to pay for the llms. I can’t justify paying that much for a product I am never going to use.

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They do. The $10/month search plan is unlimited.

The only LLM stuff in their search product is the quick answers which can be turned off and page summaries which you have to explicitly click on in a submenu in any case.

As someone aware of how limited LLMs are, I've found both of these features to be useful at times for gauging whether a site is worth visiting or not which is part of the core feature set of a search engine IMHO.

A good while back they claimed that Google search index fees make up the vast majority of their costs, so I doubt any of your money is going towards LLM BS unless you actually pay for their assistant product.

I'd expect the development of all of their product to be mostly funded by VC. If they can get VC idiots who fell for the """AI""" hype to subsidise building an actually useful thing (the search product), that's a win in my book, even if they also have to build the AI crap on the side to keep said VC idiots happy.

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Kind cool to see a profitable company like that. I worked on a place that for years was burning millions of dollars every month in hopes of eventually making it work out

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SearXNG ftw ! Also , who the heck stop using an entire month a search engine. Maybe in very isolated cases like vacations, or medic leaves, but come on...

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Which instance do you use? Or do you selfhost it? It has been hit and miss for me. Not sure if I’m doing it wrong

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After reading that essay I feel a lot more queasy about using Kagi. It's just that I really despise ads, but I'm willing to put up with it, if the search engine company is more ethical.
For the moment I've downgraded my account from 10 to 5 bucks a month. I wasn't using any of the AI features anyway.

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I started using it on instances, like other WebApps example invidious, but instances get constantly banned and sometimes you can't use them or rely on them. So yes I selfhosted it. You don't need any special hardware. Docker is very simple to use . I even went further and used an old laptop as server with Linux , installed tailscale everywhere and using funnel (or server if you don't want to expose to internet) got my own domain , with certs, with reverse proxy in one shot. It's a f miracle . Tailscale has full documentation and step by steps guides. I just followed those. If you want to make it even simpler, install proxmox and use containers . They are like tiny Linuxes with their own Mac, IP , etc

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"This is to replace our previous unfair pricing."

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Thanks for the tips

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searx.perennialte.ch has been great.

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This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?

As a paying member, I know that they started charging (and presumably transferring) VAT last year.

Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
I looked it up and there appears to be an exception for such cases where VAT is charged in the company's jurisdiction rather that the customer's (it's usually the other way around) until you reach 10000€ annual turnover. Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.

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On the one hand yes but on the other hand this would also kind of set wrong incentives: to use Kagi search less because you'd need to pay more.
That's not an incentive they or you would want.

I think what I'd like is how my mobile carrier handles their data limits: It's not an entirely fair comparison because in that case, contrary to Kagi, there is no real cost associated with my degree of usage of the service, making them entirely arbitrary and unnecessary but besides that the unused data rolls over to the next month and that's something Kagi could mirror.

I hover around 600-1000 searches per month but sometimes exceed 1000. If I could pay for 1000/month and accumulate a little buffer in the months where I search less, that would work for me. Though perhaps I'd still want to just simply pay for unlimited usage for peace of mind.

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Yeah I love those Kagi features, use them all the time.

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Yes I use DDG which gives me similar results for most things. When I can't find it there I go to Kagi. It has sometimes surprised me with much better results, but the cases are rare. I'd happily pay them 10 cents a search or something for those cases where I need to try it.

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Actually they have no VC in the traditional sense! They did private investment rounds, and I think they raised like 400k from like 60 investors or something. The actual numbers might be off, but I remember looking into this and it was lime 10/20k per investor on average, basically retail amounts.

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Russian money is directly killing people now, and if people use false equivalence like "everyone bad" then the war keeps going

Russia should be shut off from the Western world

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Wait what? They did?

I just discovered they existed today so I'm pretty out of the loop on that topic.

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Excellent read, thanks!

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I pay for kagi because it's genuinely less frustrating to use than searxng, duckduckgo, bing, and whatever shit Google is up to these days. They're fine but after years of using them I found they annoyed me sometimes. I haven't ran into a kagi search results page yet that has annoyed me by not finding what I expected to see.

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So does US one in Palestine. So does UAE, and many more. It's not a matter of "everyone bad" is the fact that legitimately if the criteria is no paying anybody in a country that is involved in killing people, or that uses services from such a country, you reach everyone. And in this case it would be not using kagi directly as a US company.

The war in Ukraine is much closer to me, but if we are talking principles I need to understand that a person from Lebanon or Palestine, or other places might have different perspective and they would demand that "we don't do business to X" has a different "X". So to accommodate most or all of these perspectives, you need to necessarily include more countries, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not the only active war at the moment.

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Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing