from Hacker News

Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools

by darthShadow on 5/23/23, 5:46 AM with 77 comments

• by californical on 5/23/23, 7:16 AM

  I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes).

  Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)

  I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).

  Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.

• by ryanjshaw on 5/23/23, 8:25 AM

  Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1]

  The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.

  Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.

  To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.

  [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html

• by sph on 5/23/23, 7:23 AM

  As an early adopter doing 1200 searches a month, this is a good change. I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota.

  As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend.

  Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better.

  I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.

• by esafak on 5/23/23, 6:58 AM

  Back to Kagi from Neeva, I guess.

  Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!

• by Sphax on 5/23/23, 6:17 AM

  This is cool, even though I haven’t managed to use the monthly 1k searches from the early adopter plan yet.

  I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.

• by WirelessGigabit on 5/24/23, 5:43 AM

  Time to take them for a spin I guess. I'm done with Google not respecting my queries. 2 words. I want them both on the page. If I want synonyms I'll type the synonym.

  It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...

• by Semaphor on 5/23/23, 6:59 AM

  Oh wow, that’s a lot. For me, it brings the Professional and Duo plans into the sweet spot (I usually have over 700 but less than 900 searches). I’m not really using the AI features, so for now I’ll stay with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features), but it’s good to know it’s an option now.

  I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)

• by itchynosedev on 5/23/23, 7:11 AM

  I ran over a 1000 searches as an early adopter last month and this is a welcome change. I also notice how often I search for the same thing over and over, or use product name searches using Kagi as a gateway. I think this shows how poor my learning comprehension / documenting habits are. Thanks for bumping up the limits, though.

  I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?

• by ulrikrasmussen on 5/23/23, 9:20 AM

  Oh, what a nice coincidence! I signed up for Kagi Standard last month and today I hit my 200 search limit this morning. 300 searches will be plenty for a month's use.

  Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.

• by plaguepilled on 5/23/23, 8:13 AM

  I would love a "dumb" search that strips out EVERYTHING except the results and their summaries. No AI. No images. Nothin'.

  At present I just filter it out with ublock, but I wish I didn't have to, y'know?

• by nottorp on 5/23/23, 10:10 AM

  What's a Kagi search?

  I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again.

  I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus.

  Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode.

  Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?

• by spookie on 5/23/23, 7:47 AM

  Seems I'm back to kagi :) Only thing I need is better non-anglosphere results, but it's understandable for now.

• by entropyie on 5/23/23, 10:05 AM

  Good to know, I was close to my limit this month!

  Keep up the good work.

• by password4321 on 5/23/23, 10:15 AM

  These alternative search engines need to partner with Mullvad for payment authentication to maximize privacy.

• by TradingPlaces on 5/23/23, 2:50 PM

  Great product; happy subscriber. I never bumped up against the 1k searches, but thanks anyway, Vlad!

• by wodenokoto on 5/23/23, 8:15 AM

  How does their AI services compare to chatgpt+?

• by DarthNebo on 5/23/23, 8:50 AM

  what a spam article for HN