Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).
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Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .
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I understand and I agree. I tried it already and kagi is great. But I’m concerned about the amount of services we will need to pay in order to stay out of the eyes . I’m not sure if it’s the way.
We have to pay for the services we use somehow. I'd rather it be cash than the details of my entire life. But the money to operate those services has to come from somewhere
That's fair, but I think they're charging too much.
Bitwarden stores my passwords, and they only ask $10/year for their "advanced" plan, and i use them almost as much as search. Mullvad VPN is privacy respecting and costs $5/month for unlimited usage.
I understand search is more compute intensive than password storage, and more R&D intensive than a VPN, but $10/month is a hard pill to swallow for that service. I could see $10/month for a combined search, VPN, TOTP, and password storage service, but just search doesn't feel like enough for that cost. Also, I have no guarantees aside from their word that they're not selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I might be more interested.
If this page is accurate, DuckDuckGo makes $0.0027/search, so if we directly converted that to Kagi's 300 searches/month, it would take 1850 searches for DDG to get the same revenue (Kagi essentially charges $0.0166/search at the $5/month plan). I know they're not directly comparable because of how they work (I don't think DDG has its own search model), I just think they're overcharging, especially since Kagi doesn't advertise (DDG absolutely does). I wish I could just pay per search. I think $0.01/search is more than fair since it's ~4x higher than DDG to account for dev efforts, and I'd like to see that go down as usership goes up. That's a ~33% discount vs the 300 search plan (which I doubt many get full use of), and it's transparent pricing. They could add prepayment or subscription discounts on top.
So Kagi has released some financial information last year: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials
Our bare cost of serving search comes to ~$0.0125 USD per query for APIs and infrastructure, not including salaries and other operating costs. In other words it costs us around $12.50 USD to process 1,000 queries. We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month. Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs. That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).
I'd love to see more updated numbers since it seems to have become slightly more popular since last year but I can't imagine them doing better than continuing to nearly break even.
Interesting, it looks like they're only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they'll be able to drop prices.
I wish they'd combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I'd already be a customer. But it's just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I'd seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn't attractive at current prices.
I'll certainly check back once they've matured a bit, but I'm not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn't ideal.
Careful! That's dangerously close to expressing an understanding of nuance on the Internet! /s
This is how we will likely end up paying for services AND STILL having our data sold. It's just the nature of capitalism. Businesses have to grow, and in today's world selling data is always the natural progression towards it.
A parallel example is streaming services starting out as "tv but no ads and on demand!" or "just pay for the service and you won't see ads!" but now we are paying and there's still ads.
Doesn’t every on-demand streaming service still have an ad-free option?
Capitalism is running out of time. It is 100% incompatible with the AI revolution and will devolve into fascism if the capitalists retain power or a revolution of varying left leaning systems if we get off our asses and eat the rich.
Either way, traditional capitalism's time is almost over.
Paying a monthly service fee to not have the company sell your data under the guise of “free” sounds quite reasonable.
How do you know they don't make you pay and still sell your data to get even more profit? Because no company who said they're not evil was ever evil?
This is unnecessarily defeatist. Plenty of businesses open and thrive without abusing their users trust. Yes, Google and a lot of other major technology companies have a history of abusing user trust with their data practices, but these companies were heavily focused on rapid growth and monetization. Rapid growth is not an incentive for every company.
If we're going down this route of distrusting everyone, how do you know there isn't a Lemmy instance running right now that's collecting data with the intent to sell?
This is unnecessarily defeatist.
Why defeatist? I didn't say it doesn't matter. I think that many, if not most, corporations are evil and you shouldn't trust a single word they say unless you are able to independently verify it.
how do you know there isn’t a Lemmy instance running right now that’s collecting data with the intent to sell?
I don't, but I also don't put a lot of sellable information on Lemmy, I rather link to my own sites, where some of them have a CC-BY-SA license. I know that everything I put on the internet is basically free game for evil capitalists.
You are already paying everywhere with your attention and your time by watching ads, it's just been normalized to the point of you not realizing it.
And if you're using an ad blocker, that's effectively piracy.
It's either this or ads or selling your data
Oh, there's a third way. Like DuckDuckGo & Qwant for example. Just have sponsored ads unrelated to you, or ads related to the specific search only (Without detailing your actual search terms to the one buying the ads) and selected companies in such "store" articles results.
I said it's ads or selling data - it can be any combination of those 3 factors
User choice in the form of multiple tiers would be ideal. I might or might not pay to remove non-creepy ads depending on how they’re presented.
Yeah, I want to pay some sort of tax so that I can afford all of this stuff. Patreon this, patreon that, pay email, pay for search, I'm not made out of money
This is so unfathomably misunderstood that I don't even know how to set you straight. You don't want to pay for things? Then you must do without or sell your personal data to advertisers or use subpar halfway-between-the-two-extremes services like DDG. There is no alternative. Nothing which costs money in the back is free and good in the front.
Kagi is for people who do not want to sell their personal data to advertisers, and who do not want to be tracked by advertisers, and who do not want in any way to support the big data-scraping ad companies that run the world by using questionable frontends. Yes, there is a way to avoid seeing ads and being tracked while using free services, and believe me, our browsers and systems are already set up that way, but we recognize that dodging these things is not a sustainable approach in the long run, and so we support paid, high-quality services like Kagi.