I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.
For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.
The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.
So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.
Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.
Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/
