Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing
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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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They tried various pricing plans although I forget if they experimented with both usage based and capped plans. Anything other than unlimited did not go over well with users. I had no desire to manage a monthly cap since my own daily usage varied so much. People had also become very conditioned to having unlimited search.
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This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
How is this FUD when you just said they admitted to it?
Exemptions vary by country, but often they only apply to small businesses.
Often there's no right to any exemptions anyway if your company isn't headquartered in the country (and Kagi is from USA).Either way you only have to pay VAT on transactions made after you go over the limit, while Kagi admitted they have to settle unpaid taxes.
This situation can only happen if they didn't pay the taxes they already legally owed.See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3592-march-19th-2024-introducing-sales-taxes
Kagi will have to retroactively pay for all sales tax/VAT that we did not collect in the last almost two years. We have chosen to absorb this on behalf of our customers.
They tried to make themselves look like the good guys, while in reality they just paid back their overdue taxes they were required to collect all this time.
Not knowing the tax rules is not an excuse.
If they wanna do business internationally they can afford to hire an accountant.Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.
It's not "extremely intransparent", it's just a little complicated.
And accountants are really cheap for small businesses. -
If I had your use case I'd cancel the while thing and only use their free plan, at this rate you're covered for 9 months or so
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Isn't this just the path of an immature company?
There's a guy who is probably a programmer and he makes a thing, starts trying to sell it. Nothing here stands out as bad intentions, it just makes me think of what it might look like if I tried to start a company (a lot of stumbling).
Plus the blog post is pretty clear it's their personal views. They spend a lot of time talking about the AI crap but when using Kagi it seems less intrusive than Google, and you can turn it off.
I dunno, I've seen this blog posted around a few times and there isn't anything in here that puts me off so long as I treat it as what it is, a subscription for that month, not an investment in the future. If the company goes bankrupt because the CEO spent investors' money starting a t-shirt company then I'll just use a different search when they shut down.
Probably worth noting I use a relay email address not my main one, but I do that for almost everything.
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Oh yeah, I'm never buying a subscription. I'm still on the trial, it's been more than 6 months already. But I would pay them something for occasional use of their search engine.
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There are no US troops in Palestine
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What about weapons? Money buy those too. Or that doesn't count for your moral principles?
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Same for me. It's like going back to the dark ages.
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I self host my own SearXNG instance on a Oracle free tier 1core/1GB ram vps. It's fast enough for me and it's free
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US weapons are defending Ukraine as we speak.
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So they cancel each other? Do you get a choice when you pay a US company to state that those taxes will need to go to Ukraine and not Israel?
Also there is a quantitative difference:
- yandex is a small % of kagi cost, of that a small percentage will go to Russian government (directly or indirectly) and of those money a part will go into military.
- kagi is US based, and Google is their main cost center. So if you consider a 10$ subscription a much much bigger chunk will go to US companies or people - who also live in US and spend money there, generating taxes. A part of all these money will go into weapons sent to Israel (or to bomb Somalia, etc.). A part will also go to Ukraine, which for the broken watch theory is one of the few times US military expense is used for something good (probably worth some caveats but OK).
Can you please elaborate what causes for you to perceive these two facts as completely different?
