This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it.
So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you would be with a new subscription.
Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.
> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.
A thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue in absolute terms.
Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.
You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.
They send by default an email every month when the payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just send the same email and state that the payment amount is covered by the previous month. They have really good practices at that.
Yet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I only ever see something like that with shipped goods where they might have to deal with a return + cancellation
That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.
Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.
A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.
I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.
I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.
The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.
Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and something that a challenger service could possibly use (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective, it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly outgoings.
There's a separate cash flow problem on doing this, a big chuck of the expected revenue comes from people that setup the subscription and forget about it
I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)
On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
The problems with per-watch pricing most come down to requiring a conscious decision each time they use your service, when you'd prefer that they be indifferent at most margins so that they don't have to be regularly reminded that oh, yeah, the amount of money they're spending on this darn this thing actually varies with how they use it.
Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and
- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99" or perhaps "rent episodes for $3.99 each, maximum monthly charge $19.99", depending on usage patterns you expect to see.
I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.
I do something similar and that's why I usually try to subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes it costs a little more because the services have to pay Apple, but for me, it's worth it.
A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.
AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower than what the subscription model would pay.
When people are confronted with the actual cost, they tend to say no.
With a subscription, their head tells them that for 10 €/$ they get an infinite number of articles.
You are really underestimating how many users just forget they have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at all.
There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.
I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a little bit like how insurance is priced.
I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches were actually done.
Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.
I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.
It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".
My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.
> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now
Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.
I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.
On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.
As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.
Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search. Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.
"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.
Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how ridiculuous this proposition is.
yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi.
Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.
you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.
People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.
According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.
Date (UTC) AI Tokens Searches
Feb 5, 2025 0 64
Feb 4, 2025 0 43
Feb 3, 2025 0 19
Feb 2, 2025 0 24
Feb 1, 2025 0 19
They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting :)
Similar stats for me. It’s become an invaluable tool, sometimes I’ll use another browser that’s has Google as default and immediately notice how much worse it is — all the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better… with the benefit of more personalization
Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
/*
Hide pre-translated webpages.
"sri-group" is main result, "__srgi" are sub results.
You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
*/
:is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
display: none !important;
}*
It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.
That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.
I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.
On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.
This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).
I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.
Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet.
Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.
5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.)
To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).
As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.
I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.
How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.
If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?
The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.
I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.
The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.
> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.
Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.
I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.
I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.
I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand.
If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.
It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.
The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.
Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.
I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)
Kagi in the other hand is useful.
Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )
Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that.
About the fair pricing:
Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.
The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.
Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.
Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.
In Europe it's law to make cancellations as easy as signing up. Also using the same methods; so if you can sign up through the web it's not allowed to only offer cancellation by registered mail that must arrive on a full moon only.
With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.
When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.
[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes
I live the rental only life and only when needed. That being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is getting something that is already old and with a lot of mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+ miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch every few years and you can even sell them for higher than you got them in years where the second hand market moves up.
Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :)
I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.
I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.
A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.
That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale enomics.
Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the shitter for it.
Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?
Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.
Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.
> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!
> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!
> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.
> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!
Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!
> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
What in the world are you going on about? Continuing to pay for something that you agreed to pay for and didn't cancel is not a "punishment". If it is, that is the silliest definition of punishment I've ever heard. It is certainly not anywhere close to "hitting my dog". So I fixed it for you:
> People who don't cancel subscriptions will continue to pay for them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm will be late for things.
Neither of those things is an injustice.
Paying for things you agreed to pay for is not a punishment. Punishment is fining companies that do not proactively cancel subscriptions on your behalf. You can set a reminder to cancel something (on a computer). Any argument you can make for a computer being used can apply just as well to the consumer as to the business.
It is very well known in basically every sphere of human endeavor that the less you do something, the less competent you will be at that thing. This doesn't need a citation – this is how humans work.
> > Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nearly no chance to actually correct the behavior.
But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This *still* wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.
If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.
About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.
Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.
Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.
Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.
People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.
People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.
The problem is that there are still huge amounts of services with awful dark patterns out there. There’s an instagram gym clothing brand called Fabletics which is £55/month for their vip tier. They auto subscribe you with a purchase (and when I say buried in the fine print, I really do mean _buried_ in the fine print). To cancel, you have to do it between the 1st and the 4th of the month, and it’s a multi page form where every page is a confirmation that is designed to look like you have unsubscribed . When services are still doing this there needs to be some rules.
Interesting take. I kinda take this a bit personal because I forgot multiple times about some subscriptions I had and I think I have my finances well under order.
I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc.
I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.
If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.
People can leave their computers behind for vacations and try to not use their devices during said vacations or small sabbaticals, you know.
Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.
European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:
- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)
- Proactively investigate and check
- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results
I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.
Yes, however fines don’t mean anything without enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they knew an individual couldn’t afford to sue over every single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth absolutely could do this.
It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed sum, whichever is higher.
For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]
(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.
This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.
That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.
If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc
You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.
If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.
A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.
This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.
I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.
Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to cancel).
Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?
My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.
We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.
Ok that’s it, I‘ll renew my account now. I‘ve been using it two years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn’t miss it, but lately I haven’t been happy with DDG and been reaching more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?
I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated purposely in R1.
Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source, then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.
It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi because I see the token in the request url.
It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration your searches
> Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?
The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.
Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.
Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.
For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.
Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.
When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.
I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a €20 euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.
We all have our red lines to draw. I personally use Kagi because it doesn't censor results from politically contentious sources like Yandex. Quite the opposite.
Exactly. I've used the free tier a bit. I'd say it's never worse than Google, and sometimes significantly better. I'll happily pay a bit for this. But no way am I paying a single cent for anything where a significant part of what makes it work is Russian.
Calling the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of hundreds of thousands people, targeting kindergartens, hospitals, normal civilians, destabilizing an entire continent --> "politics".
"any search source we consider using goes through rigorous evaluation process that considers: result quality, API availability, economic viability, result latency, legal terms, privacy terms, and technical feasibility. the moment 'politics' is a part of factors being considered for search results, is the moment I stop working on a search engine."
Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.
Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.
So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".
So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".
Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).
The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane price.
Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space charge.
AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not 1,000,000 times better than the competition.
This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).
I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.
So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.
For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid using the service for the first time that month (and a little sinking feeling when you do)?
My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes the feeling by factor of 10.
Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.
Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.
Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.
Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at Amazon haven't killed it yet.
Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to make an ethicals busines.
This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical UX.
It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)
You can disable Kagi’s AI answer feature in the settings. But, personally, I find it extremely effective. If I want an AI answer I put a ‘?’ at the end of my query, if I don’t use a ‘?’ then I get a regular search engine set of results. Really simple UX.
I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?
Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out
* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your
* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.
* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.
I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.
I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.
It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).
The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends
> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out
You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.
As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.
User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going
Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations
Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.
I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.
I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.
The Ultimate tier comes with an AI assistant that has access to Claude 3.5, GPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and so forth. It basically comes down to almost free for me.
I'd pay more for more search results (as opposed to searches, which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search rankings.
Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant. While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I prefer the latter).
One other small downside is I slightly missed google's 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results). WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this, but I did, although it was very minor.
I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium, certainly not Electron, but WebKit) but supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps, and has zero telemetry baked in and doesn't try to upsell you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase by Mozilla even at the time it was made.
Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.
I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.
Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.
Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China
No, even content hosted on YouTube. Some videos are almost impossible to search for even if they are linkable via YouTube. For instance, it's almost impossible to find the video of MSNBC hosts saying they will vote for Trump if Sanders becomes the Dem candidate. First result in Yandex. Both are vehicles for state propaganda obviously.
This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.
Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).
Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.
My impression is that pricing of kagi is already close to cost price (plus salaries).
I think we are entering an era, where these things will just not be available to people in developing countries, as they cost more than they can pay. Especially taking Ai into consideration.
However, we could start paying fair prices for produce like clothes.
Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.
Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.
A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.
I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.
This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.
Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.
An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.
Google: Don't be Evil. Although I'm having some trouble finding a reference on their website to back that up.
If you're going to start trusting search engine companies then maybe don't have them linked to your bank account. They can put what they like in a policy document but the problem is what happens when they decide to start doing things differently.
Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi. I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)
This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.
Yeah, I mean it's a positive move, I suppose (though, if this is a _common_ thing, then they have other problems, because clearly the people involved aren't using it as a search engine), but it's a strange way to market it.
Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month.
But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.
A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.
Oh wow, thanks for this, had no idea there's a credit limit.
More annoying to me is that you have to use up your credits before cancelling your sub. If you have credits and you cancel your sub, you lose the credits.
I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing.
For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager.
How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is 43,200 minutes in a month?
If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month you can search 400 billion web pages.
Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.
It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)
That's why I never ended up using ddg. On the other hand I find that kagi is decent enough when I search in French, not as good as English but still better than google.
this. I tried so many times to run away from google but I have to come back every time because all search engines are extremely anglo-centric (or maybe rather US centric) and really don't care about other localizations.
Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?
It is paid service, what is the other option? People that don't use the service being happy with it?
> because their brain wants to justify them paying for search
It is search engine, not candy crush. No one wants to pay for searching, if they do it is because they find it useful. It is not their brain gets a shot of dopamine every time they do a search on it.
I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".
You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.
Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.
The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...
Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.
But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].
We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.
Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :)
If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.
tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.
Care to elaborate? Comments like this are not helpful for people outside of whichever loop you are in, and people in the loop already know what you are alluding to.
This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.
They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!
if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.
If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!
Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.
"It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.
He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.
An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.
In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.
And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.
Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.
This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it.
So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you would be with a new subscription.
Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.
More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.
A thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue in absolute terms.
Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.
You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.
They send by default an email every month when the payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just send the same email and state that the payment amount is covered by the previous month. They have really good practices at that.
tbh, these e-mails can also prompt unsubscribing. because then I actually remember that I am still subscribed to that thing.
Yet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I only ever see something like that with shipped goods where they might have to deal with a return + cancellation
That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.
Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.
A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.
I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.
guess we'll have to switch back to ARPU now...
not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...
This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake.
I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.
Technically, they do
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149
But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining
No need to really - users + revenue is enough to figure it out. And you want to see revenue anyway.
(I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)
I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.
The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
Once you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask for a definition of ‘active’.
If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot more of them.
If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.
Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and something that a challenger service could possibly use (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective, it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly outgoings.
There's a separate cash flow problem on doing this, a big chuck of the expected revenue comes from people that setup the subscription and forget about it
I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)
On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
It's a very slippery path towards per-watch pricing with "rent this episode for just $0.99"... and that will be horrible.
The problems with per-watch pricing most come down to requiring a conscious decision each time they use your service, when you'd prefer that they be indifferent at most margins so that they don't have to be regularly reminded that oh, yeah, the amount of money they're spending on this darn this thing actually varies with how they use it.
Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and
- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99" or perhaps "rent episodes for $3.99 each, maximum monthly charge $19.99", depending on usage patterns you expect to see.
I wouldn't mind tbh, it's way better than ads and would keep me from watching bad content
Why would you otherwise watch bad content?
Why is that horrible?
I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.
I do something similar and that's why I usually try to subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes it costs a little more because the services have to pay Apple, but for me, it's worth it.
Then a particular show becomes a hit. And the company hasn't planned hardware for the spike in traffic because no one was using it before.
Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.
Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments per article for news services being just around the corner. What ever happened to that?
A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.
AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower than what the subscription model would pay.
When people are confronted with the actual cost, they tend to say no. With a subscription, their head tells them that for 10 €/$ they get an infinite number of articles.
A ton of newspapers actually tried micropayments (something like 50c per article). Almost nobody was interested, consumers do not want micropayments.
I believe instead that the future for textual content is mass syndication, just like it worked out for video content and audio content.
God I fear the advent of Reportify and Poetify
You are really underestimating how many users just forget they have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at all.
Forcing people to pay for something they are not using is a time bomb. This is a good thing and we should all be looking at how to do this.
There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.
That is what this effort is aimed at: sleezy status quo
I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a little bit like how insurance is priced.
Is there a lot of feedback from companies that have switched to similar model ? (how much it improved churn, customer lifetime value etc.)
I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches were actually done.
Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.
I think the real value is a combination.
Use LLM to sift through search results (including all the crap clickbait) and find the thing you're really looking for.
A bit like perplexity does though I run it locally with OpenWebUI and SearXNG.
I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.
It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".
My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.
> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now
Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
Know of any good pre-built blocklist?
I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.
On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.
As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.
I found it way better simply because you can blacklist garbage SEO'd sites.
There are also browser extensions like uBlacklist that can be used to do this on Google search results.
I'm not keen on browser extensions. If it does not work without extension, it does not work.
From kagi.com:
> No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search.
So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.
I straight up get better results than current Google.
Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search. Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.
"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.
I get better results.
I block the shit (a user preference with some good easy options), I up rank my favourites and pin Wikipedia.
I’m happily paying for a family plan.
Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how ridiculuous this proposition is.
You think Kagi tracks you, to the risk of killing their business, but Google doesn't track you or collect data about your searches?
yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi. Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.
you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.
People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.
What happened is exactly what's supposed to happen: You tried the product and didn't like it, so you didn't purchase it.
It's the same with test driving a car: If you don't like it, then don't buy it.
According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.
They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting :)Similar stats for me. It’s become an invaluable tool, sometimes I’ll use another browser that’s has Google as default and immediately notice how much worse it is — all the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better… with the benefit of more personalization
Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.
Keep up the good work guys!
Absolutely seconded.
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.
That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)
> You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022
I did not know this about Kagi!
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.
I honestly can't imagine Kagi being worse than Google. At minimum, Kagi lets me derank and ban domains I don't like.
My pitch to friends is that it’s like Google used to be before they started adding all the crap to their results and ignoring your search terms.
Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.
Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use said thing.
I'm in exactly the same situation as you.
I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites suppressed in search results!
I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.
How is them not supporting Safari not their fault?
On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.
same here, I need the highest tier available :)
This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).
I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.
Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet.
Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.
5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.)
https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...
To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).
As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.
I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.
How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.
> How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement
Mind-boggling to me that you'd even have to do that. I get instant notifications for all purchases, we're in 2025.
Once they stole my number and 10 minutes later I had already contested the charge, blocked the card and requested a new one.
If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?
The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.
I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.
The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
> The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.
That's fine.
It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.
I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.
Robin Hood and his Merry Men would beg to differ.
> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.
Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.
I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.
I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.
I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand.
If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.
It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.
The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.
Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.
I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)
Kagi in the other hand is useful.
Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )
Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that.
About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.
The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.
Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.
Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.
> Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.
I think that depends on your country. I’ve never had an issue cancelling my gym membership.
In Europe it's law to make cancellations as easy as signing up. Also using the same methods; so if you can sign up through the web it's not allowed to only offer cancellation by registered mail that must arrive on a full moon only.
It seems insane to me that this isnt the law everywhere.
I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.
that's called car rentals :)
With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.
When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.
[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes
I live the rental only life and only when needed. That being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is getting something that is already old and with a lot of mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+ miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch every few years and you can even sell them for higher than you got them in years where the second hand market moves up.
Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :)
I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.
lol we’ve gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a movie model.
You’re the main income source for the Netflix :)
I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.
A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.
According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So, could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier and increase new subscriptions by 30%? https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...
That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale enomics.
Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the shitter for it.
Kudos for adopting a user friendly billing policy.
I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.
You're assuming there is no cost to the business when the service isn't actively being used. Thats not always the case.
Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?
Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.
Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.
[flagged]
What a needlessly toxic take.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.
> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!
> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!
> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.
> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!
Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!
> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
What in the world are you going on about? Continuing to pay for something that you agreed to pay for and didn't cancel is not a "punishment". If it is, that is the silliest definition of punishment I've ever heard. It is certainly not anywhere close to "hitting my dog". So I fixed it for you:
> People who don't cancel subscriptions will continue to pay for them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm will be late for things.
Neither of those things is an injustice.
Paying for things you agreed to pay for is not a punishment. Punishment is fining companies that do not proactively cancel subscriptions on your behalf. You can set a reminder to cancel something (on a computer). Any argument you can make for a computer being used can apply just as well to the consumer as to the business.
It is very well known in basically every sphere of human endeavor that the less you do something, the less competent you will be at that thing. This doesn't need a citation – this is how humans work.
> > Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before. [citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nearly no chance to actually correct the behavior.
But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This *still* wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.
If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.
About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.
Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.
Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.
Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.
People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.
People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.
The problem is that there are still huge amounts of services with awful dark patterns out there. There’s an instagram gym clothing brand called Fabletics which is £55/month for their vip tier. They auto subscribe you with a purchase (and when I say buried in the fine print, I really do mean _buried_ in the fine print). To cancel, you have to do it between the 1st and the 4th of the month, and it’s a multi page form where every page is a confirmation that is designed to look like you have unsubscribed . When services are still doing this there needs to be some rules.
I am 100% against dark patterns and yes, my comment assumed that it is very easy for the individual to cancel the service themselves.
I also think Kagi is great for doing this.
Punishing companies because they don't do this is another thing entirely, which is what the comment I was replying to suggested.
This is not a dark pattern, this is illegal. Even the US has introduced click-to-cancel recently.
Interesting take. I kinda take this a bit personal because I forgot multiple times about some subscriptions I had and I think I have my finances well under order.
I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc. I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.
If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.
People can leave their computers behind for vacations and try to not use their devices during said vacations or small sabbaticals, you know.
Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.
The comment I was replying to suggested an FTC "mandate".
I think its great if Kagi proactively chooses to do this themselves.
I think it bad if you force companies to do this.
I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't live in a world which puts profits and companies over people and a qualitatively better world.
Hard questions.
Who cares anymore in 2025? Maybe in 1999, but now in about 1 year we'll have agents that can manage subscriptions automatically.
Actually, I'm pretty sure OpenAI Operator can already do that, but I don't pay $200 for Pro so I can't confirm.
In about 1 year can agents automatically bring back the pre-LLM / pre-AI internet? Thanks :)
- my agent
how would that be enforced?
European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:
- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)
- Proactively investigate and check
- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results
I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.
Also helps to scare with huge fines set up for the likes of Google and Facebook which any normal company can‘t pay in their wildest dreams.
Yes, however fines don’t mean anything without enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they knew an individual couldn’t afford to sue over every single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth absolutely could do this.
Common sense should tell you that the amount a company like Google or Meta are fined is a lot higher than a "normal company"
It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed sum, whichever is higher.
For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]
(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
EDIT: formatting
Yes, exactly. So those "huge fines" won't really scare a normal company since it would not apply to them
I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.
This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.
That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.
You’re in Australia?
If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc
You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.
If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.
A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.
This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.
I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.
Yours truely, Mr Middle Age Curmudgeon
> You’re in Australia?
Negatory. USA.
The Anytime Fitness is everywhere
Like chlamydia.
> they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease
They problem is the cancellation process, not "they shouldn't charge me if I'm not using it".
Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to cancel).
> that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it
No, the problem would be moot if the cancellation process was as easy as the sign up process. And I think the US finally got that law
Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?
Fines
My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.
We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.
Ok that’s it, I‘ll renew my account now. I‘ve been using it two years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn’t miss it, but lately I haven’t been happy with DDG and been reaching more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?
I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated purposely in R1.
Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source, then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.
That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi. Completely indispensable.
It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi because I see the token in the request url.
It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration your searches
Let's be real, this lets them have a free PR win without having to actually give up anything at all.
Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable? Just subscribed, and looking around.
> Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?
The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.
Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.
Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.
For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.
Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.
When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.
Not having to think when I search is the selling point.
Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it would just give you the result you needed in the first 3 results? Yeah, kagi does that.
In no particular order: Pinning results. Blocking Pinterest, the top few results aren’t spam. They are interesting.
I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a war.
That's definitely an interesting hill to die on. I can say as a paid Kagi user and regular donator to ВСУ
I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a €20 euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.
We all have our red lines to draw. I personally use Kagi because it doesn't censor results from politically contentious sources like Yandex. Quite the opposite.
The problem, for me, is not censoring/not censoring sources like Yandex. The problem is them sharing profit with Yandex.
Exactly. I've used the free tier a bit. I'd say it's never worse than Google, and sometimes significantly better. I'll happily pay a bit for this. But no way am I paying a single cent for anything where a significant part of what makes it work is Russian.
Glory and liberty for Ukraine!
Ah I was just looking into trying a subscription. Can't see how supporting genocide financially is impartiality.
Sources?
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Calling the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of hundreds of thousands people, targeting kindergartens, hospitals, normal civilians, destabilizing an entire continent --> "politics".
"any search source we consider using goes through rigorous evaluation process that considers: result quality, API availability, economic viability, result latency, legal terms, privacy terms, and technical feasibility. the moment 'politics' is a part of factors being considered for search results, is the moment I stop working on a search engine."
"War is politics with bloodshed. Politics is war without bloodshed."
-- Clausewitz (I think?)
What else would you call it?
War, invasion, terrorism,... take your pick.
Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.
Tangentially related:
Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.
So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".
So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".
Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).
So here are the results from Google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...
For me Google says:
Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...
So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective index than Google.
I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd consider to be spam.
But they are there, and they are real, and they don't drown out any better results.
I'd rather have no results than spam results.
Totally agree, this is my main complaint against Google.
But IIRC all except one of the ones I got were actually relevant even if I had to tweak my query even more before I got better results.
I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!
The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane price.
Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space charge.
AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not 1,000,000 times better than the competition.
I love kagi, but indeed I am a bit concerned of long term usefulness/sustainability of their model if they do not manage to reduce their search costs.
We are rapidly approaching the point where using an embedding model to run over the whole internet will be the best way to rank search results.
At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in analogue computers is today.
maybe don't search with an llm
Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.
The 10$ plan doesn't have a limit anymore!
This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).
yeah that's interesting. $5 for 35/day could be better as well
I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.
So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.
For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid using the service for the first time that month (and a little sinking feeling when you do)?
My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes the feeling by factor of 10.
Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.
Always happy to hear people finding us through HMS! It's a fantastic community, and the Handmade ethos resonates deeply with a lot of us on the team.
Thank you for your support.
- Zac
I will never support the Russian invaders. I will happily subscribe to your service if you drop Yandex. Until then, hell no.
Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.
Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.
You have to switch the country yourself. It does not get more local than country. Local searches are a weakness in Kagi, yes.
I use it in England and I've had no problem with this at all.
Out of curiosity I just tried the same search, and all the results I get are for .ie domains, so it looks to be working correctly.
Yes, and there's a dropdown so you can easily pick a country other than the one you're in.
Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at Amazon haven't killed it yet.
You mean kindle unlimited? That's the only monthly subscription they have?
I love this - the world needs more of it.
Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to make an ethicals busines.
This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical UX.
This is cool.
It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)
Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such thing but without AI stuff?
You can disable Kagi’s AI answer feature in the settings. But, personally, I find it extremely effective. If I want an AI answer I put a ‘?’ at the end of my query, if I don’t use a ‘?’ then I get a regular search engine set of results. Really simple UX.
The AI answers all have references too.
Well I guess it's finally time to try Kagi then.
I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?
Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out
* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your
* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.
* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.
I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.
I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.
It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).
The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends
> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out
You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.
As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.
User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going
Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations
[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/
What search engine do you use?
Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.
I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.
I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.
The Ultimate tier comes with an AI assistant that has access to Claude 3.5, GPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and so forth. It basically comes down to almost free for me.
I'd pay more for more search results (as opposed to searches, which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search rankings.
Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant. While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I prefer the latter).
One other small downside is I slightly missed google's 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results). WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this, but I did, although it was very minor.
Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.
I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium, certainly not Electron, but WebKit) but supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps, and has zero telemetry baked in and doesn't try to upsell you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase by Mozilla even at the time it was made.
Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.
Could be problematic since Kagi keeps paying Yandex/Russia and there's sanctions you know...
I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.
Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.
Yandex is a godsend to get information behind the silicon curtain.
Google too.
Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China
No, even content hosted on YouTube. Some videos are almost impossible to search for even if they are linkable via YouTube. For instance, it's almost impossible to find the video of MSNBC hosts saying they will vote for Trump if Sanders becomes the Dem candidate. First result in Yandex. Both are vehicles for state propaganda obviously.
This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.
Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).
Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.
[0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv` installed)
It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to make the service more accessible for developing countries.
My impression is that pricing of kagi is already close to cost price (plus salaries).
I think we are entering an era, where these things will just not be available to people in developing countries, as they cost more than they can pay. Especially taking Ai into consideration.
However, we could start paying fair prices for produce like clothes.
No good. Not fair.
I put money into the account, you bill me per search - pre-paid usage based billing is the only way this can ever be "fair".
Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.
Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.
The time it took you to submit this comment was surely worth an awful lot of those $0.0166...
A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.
I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.
> you bill me per search
This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.
Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.
An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.
> Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
https://kagi.com/privacy
Google: Don't be Evil. Although I'm having some trouble finding a reference on their website to back that up.
If you're going to start trusting search engine companies then maybe don't have them linked to your bank account. They can put what they like in a policy document but the problem is what happens when they decide to start doing things differently.
Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi. I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)
Looks like I am a kagi customer now.
What a bold and genius move.
> Introducing Fair Pricing
This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.
I guess... Still a positive thing that they are trying to make their product/service more "fair", and are progressing in a good direction?
Yeah, I mean it's a positive move, I suppose (though, if this is a _common_ thing, then they have other problems, because clearly the people involved aren't using it as a search engine), but it's a strange way to market it.
What my mind went to, how could someone forget to use a search engine, especially one that is supposedly so much better than Google for a whole month?
Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...
I think it’s a good balance between locking the user into your product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving service.
Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.
A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.
Oh wow, thanks for this, had no idea there's a credit limit.
More annoying to me is that you have to use up your credits before cancelling your sub. If you have credits and you cancel your sub, you lose the credits.
Yeah, once I discovered that, I basically bought the first six audibooks in my wishlist with the credits I had left and cancelled the subscription
I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing.
For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager.
What makes web search so expensive?
How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is 43,200 minutes in a month?
If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month you can search 400 billion web pages.
Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.
It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)
I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever had with a search engine.
Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay only for what you use.
Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly and to be commended.
I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.
That's why I never ended up using ddg. On the other hand I find that kagi is decent enough when I search in French, not as good as English but still better than google.
this. I tried so many times to run away from google but I have to come back every time because all search engines are extremely anglo-centric (or maybe rather US centric) and really don't care about other localizations.
German results are reasonable if I select Germany as a region
Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?
> Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi.
It is paid service, what is the other option? People that don't use the service being happy with it?
> because their brain wants to justify them paying for search
It is search engine, not candy crush. No one wants to pay for searching, if they do it is because they find it useful. It is not their brain gets a shot of dopamine every time they do a search on it.
I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".
I think you're talking about Choice-supportive bias.
I don't know why you're throwing this out here without anything to support it.
You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.
Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.
The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...
Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?
Search = advertisements
Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.
But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?
I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?
I trialed Kagi.
I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to Google without being tracked.
I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use Tor.
Heya, this is Zac from Kagi.
We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].
We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.
Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :) If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...
I used to have issues with VPNs but it’s been a long time ago. Works flawlessly now.
Good - looks like Kagi will be on the menu.
Note that URL is 403, from Tor browser.
Works fine from non-Tor.
(I'm now experimenting with the Kagi hidden service.)
> gave me access to Google without being tracked
Hint: you can use Google in private mode. And unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.
> unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.
That's like driving without light and seat belt. Should be very obvious to every HN reader, that a content (ad) blocker is the first thing you install
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tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.
Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and email on top of your search
Care to elaborate? Comments like this are not helpful for people outside of whichever loop you are in, and people in the loop already know what you are alluding to.
This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.
Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are billed these days.
Because they don't want the users to feel stressful for using their product more.
> LLM Apis...
Yeah exactly, ChatGPT doesn't have this option for their web interface either, only for API. For the same reason.
Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.
Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be warded off.
Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.
That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.
When most of services nowadays seem like a hostile subscription, this brings joy.
edit: use of Yandex on the other hand.. yeah that's a no go for paid subscription.
A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of money is going to Russia.
No thank you.
They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!
if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Not anti Kagi, but..
Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.
If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!
Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.
"It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.
He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.
An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.
In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.
And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.
Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.
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