Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing

[shortstack@reddthat.com]

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.

[sudneo@lemm.ee]

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.

[five82@lemmy.world]

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.

[sanpo@sopuli.xyz]

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.

[nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml]

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

[dave@lemmy.nz]

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.

[realitista@lemm.ee]

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.

[iopq@lemmy.world]

There are no US troops in Palestine

[sudneo@lemm.ee]

What about weapons? Money buy those too. Or that doesn't count for your moral principles?

[geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Same for me. It's like going back to the dark ages.