from Hacker News

Why Kagi launched "no use, no pay"

by AnhTho_FR on 4/1/25, 11:05 AM with 31 comments

• by joshstrange on 4/1/25, 5:19 PM

  I'm always interested in new ways to handle billing/subscriptions/etc and this is a cool change.

  I recently heard of a payment strategy that I liked a lot though I understand it's hard to explain to customers. John Siracusa's Hyperspace [0] app has the following options:

  * Monthly, recurring

  * Monthly, one-time

  * Yearly, recurring

  * Monthly, one-time

  * Lifetime, one-time

  More details in the developer's own words here [1]. The interesting options are the Monthly and Yearly one-time options. For anyone in the Apple ecosystem you can technically get this behavior by purchasing a subscription and immediately cancelling it (since you will get the full time period you paid for still). But I really like this payment style especially for an app like this where I don't want to pay-per-use (that feel punitive) but I don't really have ongoing data-deduplication needs (at least the features the product currently offers). It's a "once every year or so" and I might need to run it multiple times on different directories/different settings.

  "Time-based unlocks" might be a better way to think about it. There are lots of products I would 1000000% pay for 1 month of, if it auto-cancelled, but I don't need it every month. Often I just skip using the product completely since I have no idea if I cancel if they will close my account right away and/or try to refund me. I just don't want to have to set a calendar item to remember to cancel a day before it renews.

  I'm not opposed to subscriptions, developers need to make money and platforms/OS change all the time (especially in mobile) so there is ongoing maintenance. But the issue for me are apps I only need for a little bit or infrequently. If Adobe offered a "1 month, no renewal" then there is a good chance I'd still be using Photoshop instead of switching to Pixelmator Pro.

  [0] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/

  [1] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#purchase

• by siquick on 4/1/25, 9:09 PM

  I’ve been paying for Kagi for about 18 months and it’s pretty much the only subscription I have that it’s never crossed my mind to cancel it.

• by leejoramo on 4/1/25, 11:32 AM

  The first time I remember seeing a “no use, no pay” plan was with the ProVUE’s Panorama X excellent database application for macOS.

  https://provue.com/

• by 7373737373 on 4/2/25, 6:34 AM

  Note: Kagi uses and pays Yandex, some of your data and money will go to Russia

• by Rebelgecko on 4/1/25, 7:35 PM

  What makes kagi users more of a community than other search engine users? I imagine it's a somewhat self-selecting group so I can't tell if it's just verbiage or a meaningful distinction.

• by superultra on 4/1/25, 8:05 PM

  I'm really curious about this because it actually incurs some interesting possible customer service issues. Say someone signs up, then usage lapses for a while. Then they use it. Bam they're charged. Will they remember that they signed up? Some of these edge cases are defined in the article but remain unanswered. It sounds like the team at Kagi didn't even think about them, which is interesting. Still I'd like to know the answer.

• by rmholt on 4/1/25, 4:59 PM

  Is there anything that prevents Kagi from doing an OpenAI and going for profit?