Sometimes the results are things I regret looking up. Like yesterday I looked up CSAM rather than asking and now I’ve got that in my search history. At least I looked it up on Kagi and not Google!
Edit: I’m not even sure if Kagi keeps a user history. I think they might not.
I posted this further down the thread, but I’ll put it here so it’s more visible in case the discussion is interesting.
According to this source, DuckDuckGo makes ~$0.0027 per search from ad revenue. Kagi @ $5/300 searches is ~$0.01667/search, or >6x higher than DDG’s ad revenue. So is the overall value proposition from Kagi >6x higher than DDG?
So $5/month for 300 searches, or $10/month for unlimited is a tough pill to swallow, especially when I have no guarantees that they’re not also selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I’d trust them a bit more and just chalk the higher cost up to limited scale, but AFAIK they’re private so they have little incentive to reduce prices as they get more popular.
I’ve been paying $10 per month for 1000 searches for a few months now and had no plans on cancelling. This unlimited change makes it even better. Not being constantly frustrated by poor search results trying to sell you stuff or influence what you’re looking for is worth the money.
For some, money is tight, and there are already so many subscriptions available for premium service. Many of those are solutions to combat forced enshitification. The Internet is too powerful of a tool to back us into paying for every little feature. So forgive me for being a dum dum and not giving in and enabling these services that aim to nickel and dime.
No one is saying that you should pay for every little feature.
This whole thread is about a service which, in my opinion, is worth that $10 (or $5 for the standard plan) when its results are way better than the alternatives and, as the business plan is clear, it doesn’t sell you to third-parties.
And obviously, I don’t assume that the same people above who suggest self-hosting SearXNG are in remote third world countries, because economically the price is on par with it. (Yeah, yeah, “But muh $5/mo vps can do it!” You manage that and keep up with it and see how you like it just to save those nickels and dimes.)
Search was never free. And we’re talking about just $10.
300 searches per month for 5 USD sounds a bit expensive. That’s about 10 searches per day. Sometimes I have had to try four or five variations of a search query to find what I am looking for on Google. Having to worry about exhausting a paid search quota sounds a little bit nerve-racking.
Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .
I understand and I agree. I tried it already and kagi is great. But I’m concerned about the amount of services we will need to pay in order to stay out of the eyes . I’m not sure if it’s the way.
We have to pay for the services we use somehow. I'd rather it be cash than the details of my entire life. But the money to operate those services has to come from somewhere
That’s fair, but I think they’re charging too much.
Bitwarden stores my passwords, and they only ask $10/year for their “advanced” plan, and i use them almost as much as search. Mullvad VPN is privacy respecting and costs $5/month for unlimited usage.
I understand search is more compute intensive than password storage, and more R&D intensive than a VPN, but $10/month is a hard pill to swallow for that service. I could see $10/month for a combined search, VPN, TOTP, and password storage service, but just search doesn’t feel like enough for that cost. Also, I have no guarantees aside from their word that they’re not selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I might be more interested.
If this page is accurate, DuckDuckGo makes $0.0027/search, so if we directly converted that to Kagi’s 300 searches/month, it would take 1850 searches for DDG to get the same revenue (Kagi essentially charges $0.0166/search at the $5/month plan). I know they’re not directly comparable because of how they work (I don’t think DDG has its own search model), I just think they’re overcharging, especially since Kagi doesn’t advertise (DDG absolutely does). I wish I could just pay per search. I think $0.01/search is more than fair since it’s ~4x higher than DDG to account for dev efforts, and I’d like to see that go down as usership goes up. That’s a ~33% discount vs the 300 search plan (which I doubt many get full use of), and it’s transparent pricing. They could add prepayment or subscription discounts on top.
Our bare cost of serving search comes to ~$0.0125 USD per query for APIs and infrastructure, not including salaries and other operating costs. In other words it costs us around $12.50 USD to process 1,000 queries. We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month. Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs. That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).
I’d love to see more updated numbers since it seems to have become slightly more popular since last year but I can’t imagine them doing better than continuing to nearly break even.
Interesting, it looks like they’re only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they’ll be able to drop prices.
I wish they’d combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I’d already be a customer. But it’s just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I’d seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn’t attractive at current prices.
I’ll certainly check back once they’ve matured a bit, but I’m not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn’t ideal.
This is how we will likely end up paying for services AND STILL having our data sold. It’s just the nature of capitalism. Businesses have to grow, and in today’s world selling data is always the natural progression towards it.
A parallel example is streaming services starting out as “tv but no ads and on demand!” or “just pay for the service and you won’t see ads!” but now we are paying and there’s still ads.
Capitalism is running out of time. It is 100% incompatible with the AI revolution and will devolve into fascism if the capitalists retain power or a revolution of varying left leaning systems if we get off our asses and eat the rich.
Either way, traditional capitalism’s time is almost over.
Oh, there’s a third way. Like DuckDuckGo & Qwant for example. Just have sponsored ads unrelated to you, or ads related to the specific search only (Without detailing your actual search terms to the one buying the ads) and selected companies in such “store” articles results.
Yeah, I want to pay some sort of tax so that I can afford all of this stuff. Patreon this, patreon that, pay email, pay for search, I’m not made out of money
the 300/month is for the 5$ plan? possible "fair use"-like hidden limits aside, the 10$ sounds unlimited
from their front page they claim that "We do not log or associate searches with an account", and their privacy page is fairly detailed
Usually businesses changing privacy policies are the ones without a revenue model that need to figure it out somehow, and aim to IPO.
10$/month way more revenue than they could be able to get with ads, and sure, let’s hope they don’t want to IPO, because that’s the root of all enshittification.
It’s cheaper to just run SearXNG instance. People claiming any new search engine is better than established ones are hallucinating with their anecdotes.
It appears a bit more difficult than setting up the original Searx. I’ve been poking around in the code for SearXNG lately because I’m planning on migrating to it but haven’t done any serious work with it yet.
Totally valid. For me the killer feature is being able to change the weights for various sites, making it so websites with content that’s not useful to me or I don’t like don’t appear^[e.g. apple.com, facebook, nypost, quora], pinning websites that I consider best-of-class for their relevant searches^[e.g. wikipedia, the ffxiv wiki], and prioritizing websites I do like, but aren’t always the best answer^[e.g. opencritic, speedrun.com, cbc, w3schools, github].
They also have a “Lenses” feature that lets you make your own search lens (like I have one for Lemmy-only results), but I’ve not really had much use for those.
The regex redirect feature is another massive pro. I hope they bring it into Orion as well.
I already use Stop the Madness for this, and probably will continue to as it’s a more global solution, but having it built right into the search engine at least shows they’re taking real steps to hand control back to the user.
Oh ya I use that as well, to turn Youtube results into Invidious, reddit into web.archive.org/save/, twitter into nitter, tiktok into proxitok, and AMP results into normal articles. It’s nice because, since I use kagi on my phone, it reaches where extensions don’t normally.
I’m pretty sure there are browser extensions that already do this for you on Google. You can do it manually on each search but that’s obviously cumbersome. But browser extensions are basically what you’re describing and still free
Who wants to celebrate by gifting me a year? Good news though as the prices were pretty ridiculous overall. I think I’ll stay on the $5 plan as I seem to be hitting ~170 searches a month ATM.
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