Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month (opens in new tab)

Happy customer here. Kagi is by far the best search engine there is.

When I first started using Kagi a year ago or so, I compared results with Google every now and then.

Now? Never.

10 bucks a month for a tool that I use multiple times every single day is more than reasonable. The results hit home virtually every time.

There are variety of features to customize your searches but truthfully, I never found the need for them. I've only blocked/deprioritized some domains, that's it. The results are just so good.

anyone paying for kagi here ? how's it comparing to duckduckgo results ?

I think Kagi sounds interesting but the business model is a tough one outside of niche HN types. E.g. I am interested but can't be bothered to pursue it as it seems like an unnecessary additional SAS model cost to my monthly budget.

How does search quality really change my life?

Entrenched behavior is tough to overcome especially ostensibly free products.

I wish there was a way to just buy 10,000 searches as a block and charge down against it.

I don’t search that much. I don’t want another monthly service fee. But I love the idea of paying for search.

Id happily pay $5 for 300 searches, but don’t want to do that every month.

This seems like the buffet or gym model where they want people just mindlessly paying and then not using it that much.

I like the statement they made on their jobs page:

Core Front-end Team

Passion for creating delightful and swift user interfaces.

Proficiency in HTML, CSS, and _an understanding that JavaScript can be used sparingly to enhance, not create, product experiences._

Ability to prototype rapidly.

Fun fact: At Kagi, we prioritize speed, to the point where *all functionalities of Kagi Search (except Stripe checkout and Maps) work perfectly without JavaScript*. We see JavaScript as a tool to enhance the UX, not create it.

Call me tight-fisted or naive or whatever but I don't see $10/month as a remotely attractive price point and I don't see how they can justify it, especially when their results are still powered at least in part by external indexers.

$10/month can get you terabytes of media on streaming platforms.

$1-2/month is what I would pay.

I mostly use Duckduckgo these days but fall back on Google for non-English searches because DDG is lacking in that area.

Kagi users, how good is Kagi for non-English searches?

Is there a dark mode?

The example (https://kagi.com/search?q=steve+jobs) doesn't seem to respect my system theme on macOS.

Three years ago, I migrated from Gmail to FastMail because I was afraid of losing access to my digital life on Google's whim.

Two years ago, I found out that my favorite Youtube creators were all on Nebula.

One year ago, I switched my phone to LineageOS to get security updates a little longer.

A month ago, I installed OpenStreetMaps because Google Maps got really bad at showing points-of-interest.

And today, Kagi removed the only obstacle that kept me on Google Search. I'm looking forward to building my filter list.

After accidentally de-googlifying myself, I might ditch Windows next. It feels really nice using products that respect me, as opposed to services that are actively hostile because of advertisers.

This is great - I have been a happy subscriber for almost a year I think.

My biggest complaint with Kagi is not their fault - it's the inability to set custom search engines on Safari (and no, I'm not interested in installing a custom browser extension).

Interesting the HN crowd is into this for the simple fact that you must be logged in (and presumably tracked?) to use it.

How many is unlimited? Presumably they don't get unlimited searches for $10 and, inevitably, someone will use more than they planned for. How much more than they expected is considered "fair use" or however they want to term it and why can't I know that before I sign up instead of guess I'm within what they are thinking?

I definitely wouldn't want to associate my entire search history with my real identity

Hmm most of the things I used search for are now covered by ChatGPT (for which I use the api which costs cents).

I don't think web search is still important enough for me to pay for. A year ago it would have been. I originally signed up with kagi but I wasn't too impressed and then they came with the limited plans and that was it. Not sure if I'll go back now.

And yeah like the article says it was priced for "silicon valley bros". Even $10 is a lot on a Spanish salary still. But it's doable and 300 for $5 is a decent deal IMO. I wouldn't do that many.

This is going to get me to try Kagi.

I've thought about it several times, enough that I did track my searches for a week. Between work, hobbies, and just life I searched (overwhelmingly DDG and Bing) over a thousand times in a week. (A evening of prep for my tabletop RPG racked up over a hundred all by itself.)

I've bailed on Google - wading though the flood of SEO'd garbage just stopped being worth it. Bing and DDG have been mostly working, but I definitely feel like they're missing something. $10 a month is definitely worth it to try it out, and if it works for me, worth it to keep paying. I'd been hesitating because worrying about my search count seemed like a substantial negative for me.

I'm currently paying for Kagi. It's nice. But, so far I feel like it may only be like 2% better than Google, probably not enough to keep me long term.

A lot of times the results are better on Kagi than Google, but not by much. It makes sense they're similar since Kagi uses Google's index (among others).

Aside, possibly, but didn't Kagi used to be a company that collected money for shareware authors or am I hallucinating?

Can someone offer some history on Kagi? It's founder / roots? I'm curious.

Also what specific features are in the mysterious Ultimate plan?

And what was the domain before it was a search engine?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200972

Thanks!

It is the first time I hear a out kagi. What for me, as a developer, would be the selling point for using kagi instead of say phind.com?

If I could pay with Monero I’d get an account. I like what I see but don’t like the possibility of my ID being tied to my searches.

> Universal Summarizer, which can summarize unlimited-length documents, audio, and video!

Any plans to let you paste in text or a PDF yet? It's quite annoying to have to upload the audio files somewhere to get a summary.

You can block domains you don't want to see results from. With that feature I'm not sure it even needs to deliver better results than Google to be compelling.

Their previous pricing really puzzled me. If you're charging that much, the only people that benefit enough to pay have big search needs, but Kagi said "we don't want your business". Who wants to monitor how many searches they've made so they don't run out before the end of the month. Or what if your kid sits down at your computer and does 25 searches for their homework.

A lot of comments mention privacy. Could someone explain who can see my searches at Kagi? My experience working at startups is that companies are very lax with customer PII. With a product like this, I have to assume every engineer at Kagi can see every search I make.

This is pretty cool. I tried Kagi once and liked it, but ran out of my monthly search allowance within a few days. Apparently I make 20x more searches than the average user... So even if I paid, I wouldn't have enough. And I don't like the idea that I'm paying for every web search. It'd add a weird friction that I think would inhibit my flow.

Admittedly $10 still seems kinda steep for something I get for free already. But maybe I should just try it out for a month and my mind might change.

Is there killer feature that Kagi has or is it just a marginal improvement over Google? I’ve tried a few of my last technical Google searches and got practically identical results. So I’m wondering if there’s more. Is there $120/yr worth of more here?

Also, if anyone finds it substantially better, could you give some example queries on which it does better?

I just signed up for ultimate two days ago. Oh well, I suppose the extra $15 is going to a good cause.

edit: You can switch pro-rated, nice.

Is it truly worth it? Nothing appears when I search for adult content. The safe search function has been disabled.

Would love some stats in the near future of whether Google et al. are using these lists (blocked, lowered, raised, pinned) to their advantage somehow. Having said that, they have the data themselves, they just choose not to use it because it’s not in their best interests.. https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=1

I have FOMO-like feeling whenever I use a different search engine.

Specially in programming, when the right article or stack overflow can save you an afternoon, the “I wonder if I would get better results if I was using Google” feeling is hard to shake.

Too many decades, I guess. I’m rooting for something like Kagi, though. I’m glad to pay $10 for such an essencial tool. And I’ll eventually be over that hump if it proves to be as good or better consistently.

I don't understand what's wrong with charging money for a service that to the best of my knowledge doesn't serve you ads?

I've been a paying subscriber to Kagi for over a year and I'm sad to say it just gets in my way and I often find myself just wishing I was using Google.

I've kept it thus far because I believe in the mission but man... I get why other promising search engines have fallen to Google.

I tried Kagi when it was in beta, and I couldn't tell the different between other search indexers like You (you.com) or Searx. I emailed Dimitri telling them about my concerns with a subscription base search index model and they replied, "You are either used by your search engines or you pay to be free" (paraphrasing). However, there's non privacy comprising ways to do ads. I doubt a large number of people will be willing to pay for a search indexer in $current_year. Especially when there's FLOSS alternatives.

Is there any tool you can run on your browser history to determine whether 300 searches/month would be enough for you?

I'll pay for a search engine when they are transparent about their algorithm.

I would really love to see an API, possibly with a pay per request pricing.

Didn't I use some online payment system in 2001 or so, called Kagi?

has anyone figured out how to configure this on iphone successfully

I almost never comment here on HN (or anywhere actually), but I feel the need to express how happy I am that I found (lost in a comment a few days ago) this service.

For the past three or so years I have tried half a dozen times to leave Google Search. Tried DDG, Brave Search and some others I can't remember now. But the "poor" quality of results had me going to Google for half of my searches, and after a while, just Google again, for convenience.

Now, I'm at 44/100 trial searches and I already know I'm going to pay for this. It's like using Google on 2008 plus without ads. It just work wonders, and I haven't even started to play with the filter to raise/lower certain domains, which I think it's a fantastic tool to have.

Great work Kagi Team!

Glad they found a way to to walk back the limited search count (especially when so many things you wouldn't think counted did). Might have to re-enable my account now.

Previous discussion about the prior change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078392 (226 Comments)

Kagi seems great and I’m more than willing to pay, but then my searches get literally attached to my credit card. At least Google can pretend it doesn’t know me directly..

It’s not that I am involved in shady business, but I do look up strange things from time to time.

How do others feel about this?

(I feel like there is a need for a private, maybe even local, search?)

Good to see DuckDuckGo's Bang syntax [1] has become commonplace with alt search engines. Following convention, Kagi lets you append !g to divert the search on Google. A simple escape hatch like that is worthwhile as Google is often superior for local-area searches, in my experience.

I've dabbled with a multitude of search engines recently and that is one thing badly missing from Bing.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

I think using Kagi was the first time I've ever encountered an "instant switch" moment for a product I've been using for over a decade. I never realized just how much useless SEO garbage was being flung in my face using Google until I used Kagi. Of course there's the measurable added productivity of finding what I need faster, but it's also a qualitative difference in that I don't kind myself glossing over half the page avoiding ads and useless links.

I'm kind of shocked to see a company in this day and age making their service more affordable as it becomes more popular.

I'm very happy with this service. Worth every cent and then some.

Kagi seems cool, but I haven't felt that google search is so bad that I'd pay ~120/year for search. I think Google's also heard the discontent around search results lately and has been trying to improve - eg. I get relevant Reddit results now without needing to specify that into my query. I personally haven't found cases where the results are so bad I would rather start paying, but would be interested to hear specific examples to open my eyes if people have them.

I've been a Kagi customer since the beta, I'm still happy to pay for the privacy and for certain UX improvements they have, for instance being able to give higher or lower weight to different websites in search results. I do not think the quality of their search is any better than DDG or Google. If I am being honest, it's actually worse for a lot of things, if you don't factor in that you can block bad websites without a plugin.

Even paying for Kagi, I still go back to Google for any really open-ended searches where the search engine's ML can actually be helpful. For known-item searches ("fandango showtimes Seattle"), or simple searches ("pumpkin bread recipe") which are fully 90%+ of what I search for, Kagi is just fine, and they aren't after my identity (just my money).

Sign me the fuck up!

Kagi is basically now my daily use search engine apart from Startpage.

The bangs feature, where you can use a quick command to search popular sites like Wikipedia, reddit, Youtube, etc is great, and doesn't count towards your search limit.

And I'm really looking forward to using the Universal Summarizer feature which is included with these new $10 rate.

Keep up the great work lads & lasses!

At $10 to essentially have a month-long evaluation of an unhindered product... that is a steal. Time to see how Kagi performs for me! I didn't give it a try in the past because I end up doing a lot of searching during the day and Google/DDG are starting to get repetitive and annoying with their results.

I like the "Blast from the Past" unit in search results. Real sick of Google's neurotic obsession with recency as a stand-in for relevance to the point that you can tell a lot of spammy sites just fake ${CURRENT_YEAR}.

For mass market I feel 'free' will always win.

With that in mind I wonder if Kagi would be worth having ads for a free version but be super clear what the ads are based on. E.g purely based on 1) search KW and 2) IP location of the search. Nothing more and nothing additional stored.

I wonder if privacy minded people would be happy with that as it's very limited data in today's ad world, a massive improvement on anything else, plus you can turn if off if you want to pay.

I also suspect it would be ~80% as good for advertisers as so much of the rich segmenting advertisers like to pitch has limited to zero effect and KW/location are the big 2 variables.

Hi, if someone from Kagi is reading this, can we please get a lower tier than $5/month- even specially for India?

We are kinda priced out when keeping the PPP in mind.

Say $1-$2 for 100-200 queries?

Now you're priced to sell.

Have you done a formal price optimization? There are no priced competitors to pressure you to stick to a price point so you have leeway to experiment.

I dropped of Kagi after price change, mostly because I don’t think search hit should be something I need to keep in mind when using search engine.

This is a change in good direction, and I’ll happily check it once again.

Instant upgrade from the $5/mo plan to this. My biggest complaint about Kagi was that (artificial) ceiling looming over my head at 500 searches per month. Now, I can finally switch my work computer over to using Kagi and have zero worry.

Nothing to complain about here, just overall very pleased.

Kagi says that it does not link private information and searches. I'm really struggling to see how that's possible when you need to log in to search. Magic?

The anonymous payment options are cumbersome. Why not do something like Mullvad with scratch-off vouchers sold on Amazon?

It’s still a hard sell. Netflix was running at 8.99 back in the day, I pay $5 for Spotify and Hulu combo as a student. These companies pay royalties, have to secure licenses, have the equipment to feed multimedia to me, apps, Netflix even makes shows now, etc. If they want to get to the average user they’ll need to figure out either a student discount, a combo with another service, light ads like Hulu or optimize their costs.

Also happy Kagi customer. It is my default search and I get much less fluff in the results than I did with big G. So happy it respects search modifiers!

Has someone tried using Kagi extensively in non-english languages ? I wonder how well my family would adopt it, and it depends heavily on this

Hard to explain how much cleaner search gets with Kagi after just a couple of tweaks. This is a no brainer upgrade for me. Kudos to the team.

Kagi is my default search engine and I'm happy with it except for one category of search: location-sensitive.

I live in San Francisco, and if I type "sf weather" into Google, I get a weather forecast for San Francisco. If I type "sf weather" into Kagi, I get a weather forecast for Santa Fe, which, while technically a valid result for those search terms, is useless to me. Similarly, it's easy to search for restaurants and get search results for other restaurants of the same name in different cities.

But most of my searches aren't location-sensitive, and Kagi does a great job the rest of the time.

I was just evaluating Kagi earlier this week. Personally I'm still content with DuckDuckGo, but I'll have to keep this in mind. Especially if DDG keeps building silly things like yet another private browser.

Woohoo! I always commented that I'll switch to kagi when they get to $10 for unlimited searches. That time has come!

Kagi is the single best productivity tool I've added to my kit in the past year. It is easily worth the price.

How often do you use a general search engine and what are you searching for?

For me, if it is related to my job, I am usually going straight to the docs, language forums, and sometimes stack overflow. It's only if I am looking up a specific error that I do a general search (although that is getting harder and harder as more words are ignored).

Personally, I rarely search. Music related? Straight to Metal Archives. Tv/Movie related? straight to tmdb.org. General Reference? Wikipedia. Stats/Facts? WolframAlpha.

I'd say I use a general search engine only a few times a week total.

Been using Kagi for 2 months now and am pretty happy. Have been using the $10 plan even though I didn't cross the threshold as I think it's a good cause.

My two main complaints:

- It's not very good with conversions. Say searching '120mph in kmh' doesn't work. Or the little widget with conversions that do work like '120cm in m' doesn't allow to change the input and change values on the fly.

- The image search is super slow for whatever reason. It takes about 5 seconds before images show when doing a search.

I cannot comment on how good Kagi is - based on enthusiastic reviews here, I can only assume that its results are of phenomenal quality. Again, based on those view, one could easily imagine Kagi taking over the world. I glimpsed at their transparent stats and they are only at 8.8k paying users. This is not a bash or a critisism, but just sharing how things are different when observed from a HN lens.

https://kagi.com/stats

How well does it work for non-English languages? I just tried it out for Swedish and had issues finding relevant results, especially searching for things like restaurants or hospitals.

Very exciting news. I’ve been trialing Kagi for a while now, and just signed up for this new unlimited plan without hesitation. Google’s results have been getting so awful and full of content farms lately, and it’s nice to be back in control of what sort of sites show up for different searches.

I’m eager to see where Kagi goes from here. I’m skeptical that it’ll expand beyond people in the tech industry and their close relatives, but maybe that’s not a bad thing if it’s sustainable for them long term.

The summarization feature has been an insane time saver for me.

On the cybersecurity front there are so many research articles, conference videos, and news articles just constantly flooding your feeds. There was an article on HN recently about the importance of "Critical Ignoring", to know what to ignore.

This has been a key tool in speeding that process up. Especially conference materials and news articles. They have such clickbait titles, it can be hard to determine what is legit and what is obvious. For news you can get a use the source as a fairly decent gauge on what the articles will be (quality wise). But for conference materials it is so hard. Summarization with the "Key Moments" lets you quickly determine if I should dig in more or not.

The Discuss option is super helpful on huge framework/audit documents to help you figure out is this the standard that requires xyz vs the other one. Once i know i'm in the right doc then i can zero in on what I was looking for.

Presenting Kagi as a tool for use in our larger Principal/Architect team next week. Will be very interested in Enterprise/Corporate plans once they are a thing.

Thanks for all the work Vlad (and team)!

I'm already a paying customer but all I can say is wow. It is rare to see companies offer more for less price, especially in this economy.

Good job Kagi, seriously!

Unlimited searches are great to see included by default. A big part of my search engine usage is as a glorified bookmark manager, where I know I want to go to a specific MDN page, but I don't want to open MDN and search for that page specifically. It always felt awkward going all-in on Kagi when I knew that most of my searches were served just as well by an ad-supported search engine.

Kagi is awesome, can’t recommend it enough. I have been waiting for years for a viable paid Google alternative and couldn’t be happier now.

This new pricing scheme made me switch.

I still think though that in many countries it's still high.

At least from my friend group, <5$/mo is the price where most would stop "thinking about it" and just subscribe to try the service after a friend recommendation. You would probably retain most users that would otherwise never have tried it in the first place. I rely on search for work daily, and I want to support non-ad-supported business, so I'm biased. If most users don't really reach the original 1000q/mo, then more regular "non-power" users could offset the cost. Or maybe that's already factored in the current pricing.

Either way, I did enjoy kagi quite a bit on the first beta, so I knew exactly what I was in for. But if I would have subscribed as a test with the 100 initial queries I don't think I would have got attached to it. It took me a while to trust the result and compare it with other search engines to get a feeling for the service.

Was an early adopter and also love it. Very high quality results. No bullshit Google ads. Extremely easy to use out of the box with no customisation and lots of advanced features.

Any chance of some bonuses for the early adopter people ? Totally get that you want to keep "Ultimate" it's own higher tier thing but maybe there's an in between ?

Love Kagi. First search engine I’ve been willing to ditch google for.

I recall hearing that Google and Bing have a nearly insurmountable lead in terms of raw ability to index the web, and that all other "alternative" search engines are using Google and/or Bing under the hood. Is this the case for Kagi? Or is Kagi actually maintaining and drawing upon their own independent index?

This is timely, I signed up last month for the $10 plan and burned through the limit like halfway through the month without even turning it on at work.

When I'm writing code I tend to search a lot, and I'd resigned myself to not using kagi because I didn't really want to bump up to the $25 plan.

Resubscribed. I liked Kagi when it came out, happy to give it another shot.

The search UI seems broken on my Firefox due to some absolute styling. I had to set this in my Stylus config to fix

.auto_suggestions { padding: 0; top: unset; }

The auto suggestions were appearing over the top of the search bar due to unruly top css.

I think $5-$10 is a good price point for just the privacy aspect. As far as search, it's about 90% kagi and 10% Google if I don't like the kagi results. Maps could use some work and I'm always jumping back into Google maps.

I don't use any of the other features.

I don't directly use Google or Bing much any more but I know that Duckduckgo is terrible now.

If you get results that don't match your search term and try to filter them you actually get more of the bad results.

That's a product that flat out doesn't work in my opinion.

Keen to try it. I would worry that over time, poor people wouldn’t get access as they do with ad-supported services. Maybe search credit donations could be pooled somehow, so I could do $5 for me, $2.50 for students/emerging economies.

It still seems expensive for just a search engine. You can get a streaming subscription for that and that has actual content on it. You’re just listing other people’s content.

What are you offering me that is worth $10 more than just using DDG?

I‘m using Kagi for a month now and switched over all my devices to Kagi as a default search engine. I tried doing the same with DDG a while ago but it never really stuck, with Kagi I’m happy and was actually sad when I ran out of credits and had to use Google until I increased my quota. For the first time since I started using Google the search interface looked clunky and unfamiliar after getting used to Kagi for a month.

This couldn’t have come at a better time as I was a bit hesitant to add another subscription while still keeping in mind the additional searches I might have to pay on top. Signed up for a year!

This is great I just signed up! Been wanting to bail on free search for a while now, hoping paid search will prioritize users needs above all else. Crossing fingers they can go the distance, scale, and stick around a while.

I am so proud to be one of Kagi customer. Please check out my 3 favorite features of Kagi: - Small web: a collection of human blogs that you can submit your own. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web - Lens: customized search result https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html - Bang: very similar to DuckDuckGo bang.

I looked into Kagi a week or so ago from a different HN link and was turned off by the Apple-focus. I've had bad experiences in the past with early adopting and regretting it because I don't use Apple products. I understand they plan to support non Apple stuff but it's never clear if that support will be first-class and it often isn't. Considering that it's a Chromium wrapper, it seems odd that they took this route.

It's also not clear if there are device/location limits for an account. I use a lot of devices and travel quite a bit.

I like the domain rankings, seeing which domains get raised or lowered by people (https://kagi.com/settings?p=rule_leaderboard)

I'd love to see a upvote/downvote system per query/result, as another ranking metric. Especially if it can cluster recommendations by "users like me", similar to how Netflix recommendations used to work.

Maybe don't apply it to political searches, lol, but for everyday queries I'd find that really useful.

Does anyone outside the US have a great time with Kagi? I tried it for a few months but found it to be very US focused. Perhaps I just didn't spend enough time shaping my queries.

I cannot see myself subscribing until they make the search API generally available.

>NOTE: The Search API is currently only available to customers of the Kagi Teams plan. Please reach out to vlad@kagi.com for invite.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html

It sounds like an excellent product, but I don't want to be forced to use their client/interface; I want to be able to make my own.

At launch, if I remember correctly, Kagi relied on the Google Search API. The poor economics of that decision were a big part of why it was so expensive. Has that changed?

Really bad timing for me. I just locked in a year of the Ultimate plan - three days ago!

I only did that for the unlimited searches!

I don't feel like I'm a heavy user, but after nearly 4 days of usage, seems like I typically do ~30 searches per day, but hit 60 searches on one of the days.

It's still early days, but I'm enjoying Kagi so far. I think the biggest problem I'm having is a sort of psychological block that when I run a search I expect to see Google.

I don’t see an option to “try before I buy” (without setting up an account) but maybe it’s there? That’d be useful to win over users. Account set up is friction

Reading more about this lately; does it have an API and/or can it be automated? I would like a search engine in my workflow, not via their interface.

Kagi really is good. I blew through the 300-search plan in like 2 weeks, then upgraded to the $10/1000-search plan. I've been following them on discord. They've been pretty upfront about everything, and they meet their projects. So today I upgraded to the $25/mo Ultimate plan because I want them to succeed. DDG never did it, bing never did it, but I really think Kagi is a runner.

Anyone in Europe have experience with how well it performs when searching for local things like stores, local organizations, and the like ?

It was pretty obvious that this was what the price needed to be from the start, so it’s great they have been able to finally make it work.

This is great, I did the trial and the reason I chose to not continue is I hated having to think “is this search worth it” for everything.

Just searched for something technical and didn't get GeeksForGeeks as the first search result unlike Google. I'm already sold.

I’m very glad there’s a market for paid premium search engines and based on the comments here Kagi is doing fantastic.

However I experimented last week by running all my searches (work and personal) in DDG (my default) and then also in Kagi. And basically they either both had the best result first, or sometimes second or third. Definitely not a $10/month difference for me.

This is great, I had a limited number of queries with my previous plan and I would end end using duckduckgo most of the time out of fear of "wasting" my limited kagi searches.

The mental gymnastic of having to decide if a search is worth using Kagi for, ended up in my not really using Kagi..

This unlimited (and reasonably priced) solves this, thanks!

I don't see myself paying $10/month for search but I could see myself paying even more for a bundle of services that included search. Maybe a bunch of these companies that treat you like a customer instead of a product for advertisers can partner up and do a single login and subscription plan together.

This is great news. I've been paying for a couple months now and I've been happy with the results and the previous limits weren't something I even needed to worry about in the end (I did worry at the start but only because I had no idea how many searches I do to gauge which plan I needed).

Bizarrely, many search engines seem to think it would be helpful to truncate the titles of search results. For example, the example search "python exceptions" suggested by Kagi on their homepage results in:

> How to Handle Exceptions in Python: A Detailed Visual...

A search on DuckDuckGo displays the complete title.

I was just thinking about purchasing a subscription last month, glad to see the price has dropped, I will definitely be buying it now,, also seems like they allow using PayPal which is a bonus. The results I've gotten on kagi at far superior to Google so I am happy to make the switch

This is a minor detail, but I am impressed that the settings page has custom CSS. Getting this simple option feels special after seeing many companies, which had custom CSS, remove its support for the sake of hypothetical average user who cannot be trusted with anything other than GUI.

The last time this came up this was my only complaint. Limits create anxiety for me because I’m weird that way. Either I worry it won’t be enough or I feel like I’m leaving money on the table. Unlimited completely changes the feeling of it for me and now I’m on board. Sold.

Never heard of this before. But if the results are actually better than Google as people say, than it’s worth trying. I’ve literally stopped using Google for a while now (and instead use chatGPT and Youtube) because all those articles were just some SEO-optimized bullshit

What's the language support like? I can find what I need in English, but I really struggle to find good search results in Japanese - but if that isn't something they've been paying attention to then they're unlikely to be good at it.

Browsing the site on Tor Browser gave me a Google 403 page until I cycled circuits a few times. Makes perfect sense given the blog is hosted on GCP but it did make me pause initially and consider if that was some sort of joke I'm not getting.

This was a very good decision. It was a poor use experience to pay $10/month and regularly get notified that I had gone over my search count; it discouraged me from consistently using Kagi. Glad the $10/month level is now unlimited.

I was about to setup a subscription, but haven't found my language in Interface Language settings. Why there is no translation for widely used languages like Chinese, but avaiable for super rare languages like "Luxembourgish"?

Who was it that observed that one of the horrors of the internet as we have built it, is that because we are the product, we live in a world where whatever is free is evermore enshittified,

and only those with means can afford to not be sold.

And e.g. get high-quality search results.

Ugh.

I don't like the idea of tightening search queries to credit card, however they add option to pay by crypto... That is good approach. But still I refuse to pay subscription model for product that I wouldn't use regularly.

Much like youtube, I'm fine paying $10/yr, but $10/mo is pretty steep.

I've actually found I barely use search engines anymore. I go directly to sites. Seems like people have forgotten this. I've heard good things about Kagi but at the end of the day, we have an address bar for a reason.

Interesting, how seeing the “g” logo created a feeling of it is Google for a moment

Please charge me per query, not a monthly subscription. Ideally 1c per x queries, where x>=5 or around that ballpark, otherwise it's a no from me.

For comparison, I pay $5 a month for my phone carrier with unlimited everything.

I misread the title as "$10 a year" and was hyped, then was thoroughly disappointed when reality set in.

I already have too many subscription services. $10 for some occasional weekend web searches won't do.

Kagi seems ideal for pre-paid usage-based billing - particularly given they've already implemented the usage-based billing part.

A recurring subscription plan for something like this makes no sense to me personally.

This finally prompted me to try Kagi - and it seems like I’m going to be paying for it after all. I’ve gotten on okay with DDG until now, but this certainly appears to be a step better again.

I'm trying Kagi now :

- search results are greats !

- the speed isn't that great (results can take more than 1s to show) : does it become faster once you pay for it ? Or maybe it has to do with the access from europe.

Been subbed to Kagi for a few months and think it is mostly equivalent to google — which is big praise.

I’d say local searches are a little rough still but otherwise have rarely needed the g! bang

I have just tried it and it is a little disappointing. `mjml2json in browser` returns completely irrelevant results in the third link, that have 0 mentions of mjml or mjml2json.

Okay, I am seriously considering this now for two reasons:

1. Family Plans: I prefer managing things for the family

2. Unlimited: Usage-based risk was too high even if I wouldn't have used it to the high end.

More interested in the Summarization API. There is no way to control the summary generation though, like, specifying that I am only interested in certain kinds of information.

This post has brought Kagi "a few" new users https://kagi.com/stats

I love Kagi! Happy customer since they started asking for money! I tried so hard to use ddg but I always found myself just banging to Google. I actually use Kagi results!

Anyone using the Family Plan with grade schoolers? How is it?

OK, but am I the only one finding Kagi "super" slow comparing to other search engines? It takes like a good full second to load the results…

> Integrate Kagi.ai into your production system. Priced at $50 per thousand queries, with a minimum of $1,000 annual commitment.

Is this going to change as well?

"Unlimited" positioning rubs me the wrong way. It really means "until we deem to be no longer reasonable for personal use".

I would advise them to include 5/10 search per year in the free account for people to check if Kagi reach the point it is useful for them

Yeah $10 a month is crazy for a search engine, I would expect a lot more for that price! I an happy with searx and similars in the meantime.

What annoys me is that no search engine places quitfacebook.org among the first results despite searching for “quit facebook”.

Excited to see this. Thinking about using this on mobile and all PCs I use now that there is no worry about hitting a quota.

Woohoo! I always commented that I'll switch to kagi when they get to $10 for unlimited searches. That time has come!

Has anyone know about https://0.kagi.com?

Does Kagi work for piracy related searches? Yandex is right on the money for those kinds of queries, how does Kagi do?

It's getting better. Waiting for the price to drop from an US latte to an eastern european latte per month.

Does anyone have experience with Kagi in relation to academic searching? Does it perform better in this sense?

Does kagi remove the need to add "reddit" after every query to get some real human results?

Do they have a search API? Last I check the documentation site vs main site said conflicting things

this is welcome news, and i will likely reinstate my subscription.

however, i'd like to point out that in my understanding, most of my $10 will go to google, in kagi's payment for their search service, rather than support kagi or their mission.

please correct me if that's not the case.

Advocate of the devil, could this be a last ditch effort to remain competitive against LLMs?

Anyone know if the "Universal Summarizer" is reliable, or does it make stuff up?

A good deal worse than google for results in my niche (Korean entertainment). Oh well.

Is there an option to use the API and just pay per use? I couldn't find it.

How does Kagi perform for non-English websites? Eg german, Japanese, Chinese?

Another happy paying customer here. Very much worth the price for the value.

Kagi looks great. But does it search academic papers like google scholar?

1401 points, 747 comments, happy customer comments

and yet I am not understanding WHY :)

Probably in a few years this will be bought by google, ms or amazon.

Anyone experience how Kagi performs with non-english searches?

Why would I pay this when I have every search engine for free?

I tried out Kagi the other month. I went back to brave search. The killer brave search for feature for me is the goggles.

You can even create your own goggle and narrow down searches to whatever you want. I wish Kagi supported that as well.

About time. The old prices and search limits were naughty.

Everyone ok with your searces tied to your credit card?

Might buy access for the universal summarizer alone.

Another happy customer chiming in. This is awesome

Does this apply to the legacy pro plan as well?

they did it god damn. Literally best service I pay for. I do around 100 searches a day, but that's no longer relevant!

I guess we are legacy early adopters now!

How are the results outside SV/tech/software development? I worry it'll be like early DuckDuckGo with a hard tilt toward libertarian and conservative content no matter what you search for. I couldn't search DDG back then for anything remotely queer without at least one result telling me I'm going to hell and a menagerie of op-eds from right wing figureheads.

I can't do a long demo like I did with DDG because of the free limits, and $5-10 is a lot of money for me right now. So I ask here.

Do I get FastGPT with the 10 USD plan?

Done. The price was my only problem.

Good. Now I can finally subscribe!

I don’t have a problem with google

I love anything that gets me off Google products. I’m using plausible analytics now too. This looks cool!

Just subscribed.

Quality search is priceless.

I'm in, now :

thanks for the discount

just use kagi, best search engine

Bueno!

YES!!

I love seeing the success of kagi! I’m an early adopter and the search results quality plus the hidden gems plus the ability to customize them is just fantastic!

A example of customization that I’ve been experimenting is lowering a bit the results from stackoverflow to see official documentation first, it’s been working like a charm!

Thanks again for making kagi in spite of all the naysayers!

Another Kagi blog post (the small web one) convinced me to sign up and the limited number of searches for $10 was my main hesitation. I signed up anyways and haven't regretted it at all. It's a bummer Safari doesn't support custom search engines very well, but the Kagi extension works well enough.

This change will make a lot of other people like myself a lot more comfortable with signing up I bet.

This is hilarious with all these celebrations from Firefox fans on HN using Kagi paying for search.

Firefox fans need to know that by using Kagi you're hurting Firefox (and Mozilla) as they are completely dependent and need to beg for Google's millions for being the default search engine.

Unlimited Kagi searches at $10 is still unsustainable vs free Google searches. By default, Kagi will either (eventually) raise prices or reduce them to compete in the race to zero on search with Google already at the finish line.

So please continue the 'celebrations'.