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Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
(blog.kagi.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Technology
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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.
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.