from Hacker News

Fair Pricing

by CleverLikeAnOx on 2/5/25, 5:50 AM with 498 comments

• by dirkc on 2/5/25, 7:59 AM

  This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it.

  So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you would be with a new subscription.

  Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.

• by ajdude on 2/5/25, 8:15 AM

  Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.

  Keep up the good work guys!

• by vincnetas on 2/5/25, 6:49 AM

  Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet.

  Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

• by percevalve on 2/5/25, 10:59 AM

  I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.

  A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.

  According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So, could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier and increase new subscriptions by 30%? https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...

• by efitz on 2/5/25, 6:02 AM

  Kudos for adopting a user friendly billing policy.

  I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.

• by manmal on 2/5/25, 7:16 AM

  Ok that’s it, I‘ll renew my account now. I‘ve been using it two years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn’t miss it, but lately I haven’t been happy with DDG and been reaching more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?

  I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated purposely in R1.

• by pseudocomposer on 2/5/25, 1:11 PM

  This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).

  I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.

• by denkmoon on 2/5/25, 6:17 AM

  That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi. Completely indispensable.

• by llm_trw on 2/5/25, 8:21 AM

  The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane price.

  Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space charge.

  AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not 1,000,000 times better than the competition.

• by annexrichmond on 2/5/25, 6:33 AM

  Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.

• by s_dev on 2/5/25, 9:25 AM

  I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a war.

• by yellowapple on 2/5/25, 6:33 AM

  Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.

• by gaazoh on 2/5/25, 9:08 AM

  Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out

  * I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your

  * I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.

  * Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.

• by stevage on 2/6/25, 12:41 AM

  It seems "fair" but, if they even make a single search in that month, you charge them the full monthly fee.

  Real "fair" pricing just charges per request, and has the per-request pricing progressively go down as they reach various thresholds. Preferably with a free tier.

• by haxton on 2/5/25, 6:16 AM

  Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at Amazon haven't killed it yet.

• by mbix77 on 2/5/25, 10:20 AM

  I will never support the Russian invaders. I will happily subscribe to your service if you drop Yandex. Until then, hell no.

• by neilv on 2/5/25, 8:07 AM

  For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid using the service for the first time that month (and a little sinking feeling when you do)?

• by a12k on 2/5/25, 2:14 PM

  I am hyper aggressive about cutting monthly services. If I don’t feel I am getting value, or can get the value from somewhere else with a little more work, I cut it. For example I would never, ever pay for YouTube Premium. This has led to a pretty disciplined set of monthly services and low cost. Kagi though is one of the most useful services I have and goes way above and beyond this bar, so keep it around.

  To ape someone else’s lament: I can’t take advantage of this because I use it daily.

• by eitland on 2/5/25, 12:21 PM

  Tangentially related:

  Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.

  So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".

  So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".

  Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).

  So here are the results from Google:

  https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...

  For me Google says:

    > No results found for "Every input is best at something ".
    > Results for Every input is best at something (without quotes):
  

  Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:

  https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...

  So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective index than Google.

• by nomilk on 2/5/25, 7:19 AM

  I'd pay more for more search results (as opposed to searches, which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search rankings.

  Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant. While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I prefer the latter).

  One other small downside is I slightly missed google's 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results). WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this, but I did, although it was very minor.

• by jjice on 2/5/25, 7:35 PM

  The thing I appreciate most about Kagi is their "Quick Answer" option. Suffixing a question mark on a query to give me a high quality, cited RAG (?) AI summary has been such a nice option for quick answers.

• by Shorn on 2/5/25, 6:53 AM

  No good. Not fair.

  I put money into the account, you bill me per search - pre-paid usage based billing is the only way this can ever be "fair".

• by junon on 2/5/25, 6:29 AM

  Well I guess it's finally time to try Kagi then.

• by tossandthrow on 2/5/25, 10:38 AM

  I love this - the world needs more of it.

  Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to make an ethicals busines.

  This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical UX.

• by leokennis on 2/5/25, 9:36 AM

  I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing.

  For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager.

  What makes web search so expensive?

• by wenbin on 2/5/25, 4:08 PM

  It’s great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.

  The first time I encountered this was with Slack—they only charge for active users.

  We follow a similar approach with our products : 1) PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium

  Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they’ll request for hourly fair pricing - don’t charge me for those hours that i don’t use your service!

• by cianmm on 2/5/25, 10:30 AM

  Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.

  Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.

• by barnabee on 2/5/25, 8:16 AM

  This is cool.

  It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)

• by rettichschnidi on 2/5/25, 6:31 AM

  Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.

• by roenxi on 2/5/25, 9:35 AM

  An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.

• by ryukafalz on 2/5/25, 1:54 PM

  This actually makes me a lot more likely to sign up for Kagi! I've been hearing good things about it so I've been interested, but these days I'm very subscription-averse because there's just so dang many of them. But only paying for it if I actually use it makes signing up lower risk. (I know myself well enough to know that there's a good chance I forget to cancel otherwise.)

• by rpastuszak on 2/5/25, 8:58 AM

  Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...

  I think it’s a good balance between locking the user into your product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving service.

• by ciphix on 2/5/25, 7:57 AM

  This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.

• by wtmt on 2/5/25, 8:49 AM

  I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.

  I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.

• by wiether on 2/5/25, 9:00 AM

  Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.

  A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.

• by Imnimo on 2/5/25, 5:52 PM

  Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?

• by forty on 2/5/25, 12:29 PM

  Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such thing but without AI stuff?

• by whereismyacc on 2/5/25, 11:34 AM

  I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?

• by hnlurker22 on 2/5/25, 9:46 AM

  Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

• by Euphorbium on 2/5/25, 7:51 AM

  Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay only for what you use.

• by padolsey on 2/5/25, 9:15 AM

  It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)

• by pointlessone on 2/5/25, 10:35 AM

  Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.

• by rsynnott on 2/5/25, 11:03 AM

  > Introducing Fair Pricing

  This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.

• by larrybolt on 2/6/25, 10:21 AM

  This feels like an example of a company trying to do the "right thing" and deciding there must be a way to monetize that, regarding what everyone (even the web) is telling them.

  Imagine the balance of revenue from non-returning users (think fitness) vs very heavy users, and finding a way to keep both parties happy. And the implications it has (those "paused" users still count towards "onboarded" users).

  Major props Kagi team, or who-ever pushed this idea!

• by cyberax on 2/5/25, 8:27 AM

  Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.

  That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.

• by zOneLetter on 2/5/25, 2:37 PM

  Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.

• by siddharthgoel88 on 2/5/25, 6:05 AM

  This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.

• by icar on 2/5/25, 8:24 AM

  I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.

• by linsomniac on 2/5/25, 2:40 PM

  I would have purchased several services over the years if they had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they did not). In particular there was some video editing software for $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my craw the months I didn't use it.

• by maelito on 2/5/25, 2:39 PM

  Still no revision of the Yandex partenership. Spending money on Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist state.

• by butterNaN on 2/5/25, 8:28 AM

  They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!

• by sma3in on 2/8/25, 1:50 PM

  Good pricing approach that I think lots of companies should start adopting. But I just can't wrap my head around paying for my online searches. self hosting a free service like SearXNG will forever my go to option for privacy and security

• by mystified5016 on 2/5/25, 11:43 PM

  Is there any concern that this results in a negative feedback loop of "oh, I better not use Kagi for this one random thing, it'll cost a whole month's subscription"?

  Maybe a threshold of a dozen searches or so before the subscription fee kicks in.

• by paradox460 on 2/5/25, 9:09 PM

  They say billing cycle, but what if I'm on the annual plan? Is my cycle a year? Or does my renewal date get pushed back a month if I don't use it?

  I use kagi hundreds of times a day, so it's not something likely to happen soon, but I'm still curious

• by __MatrixMan__ on 2/5/25, 1:39 PM

  Wow, awesome. If everybody did this I could stop charging my credit card number every 6 months.

• by Vexowsky on 2/5/25, 8:23 AM

  tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.

• by bugtodiffer on 2/5/25, 8:28 AM

  Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and email on top of your search

• by CaptainFever on 2/5/25, 7:50 AM

  Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly and to be commended.

• by bryanmgreen on 2/5/25, 10:52 PM

  A good chunk of inflation is just price gouging, in today's modern world.

  There are more tools to understand data and squeeze every penny from customers.

  It's admirable when a company isn't trying to bleed customers dry.

• by edude03 on 2/5/25, 2:08 PM

  I don't understand people who would use kagi (or any search engine) sparringly. If you're already willing to shell out money for a replacement, why wouldn't you use it all the time?

• by casenmgreen on 2/5/25, 7:01 AM

  I trialed Kagi.

  I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to Google without being tracked.

  I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use Tor.

• by siliconc0w on 2/5/25, 5:15 PM

  Every service provider should be obligated to do this. I'd bet there are tons of phone or Internet plans that have 0 usage

• by whalesalad on 2/5/25, 4:02 PM

  this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?

• by AiAi on 2/5/25, 11:55 AM

  It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to make the service more accessible for developing countries.

• by jbverschoor on 2/5/25, 7:59 AM

  Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?

  Search = advertisements

• by m_kos on 2/5/25, 4:37 PM

  A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute even more free translations.

  Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to lose some of your goodwill.

• by pmkary on 2/5/25, 9:24 AM

  Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.

• by zuzulo on 2/5/25, 10:33 AM

  I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever had with a search engine.

• by sizzle on 2/5/25, 9:12 PM

  Someone please convince me to use Kagi. What makes it superior to Google for you?

• by daft_pink on 2/5/25, 1:51 PM

  It’s nice that they are in a position that they can do this. I use Kagi every day.

• by manx on 2/5/25, 7:57 AM

  Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are billed these days.

• by tstocker on 2/5/25, 3:39 PM

  What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused credit ?

• by lyu07282 on 2/5/25, 7:59 AM

  if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

• by MrOxiMoron on 2/5/25, 4:21 PM

  Can I get this on my Netflix, Disney+, whatever too pls?

• by eth0up on 2/5/25, 10:32 AM

  Not anti Kagi, but..

  Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.

  If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!

  Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.

  "It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.

  He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.

  An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.

  In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.

  And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.

  Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.

• by i5heu on 2/5/25, 12:30 PM

  Looks like I am a kagi customer now.

  What a bold and genius move.

• by neoromantique on 2/5/25, 9:39 AM

  A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of money is going to Russia.

  No thank you.

• by chuckadams on 2/5/25, 5:40 PM

  Just raising my hand as another who would sign up, but for that whole Yandex thing.

• by neves on 2/5/25, 1:51 PM

  Does it mean that if someone dies they won't need to cancel the service?

• by nashashmi on 2/5/25, 12:00 PM

  Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?

  I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?

• by miki123211 on 2/5/25, 6:18 PM

  Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.

  I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that would be added to my 100 free searches.

• by stuartjohnson12 on 2/5/25, 11:51 AM

  Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be warded off.