European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:
- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)
- Proactively investigate and check
- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results
I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.
It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed sum, whichever is higher.
For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]
(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
Can you explain what you mean? I get the sense of sarcasm, but I'm not sure. 4 % of annual turnover [1] or 20 Mio, whatever is higher, appears substantial to me. If Alphabet would have been fined once in 2024 it would have to pay 4 % of its annual turnover of the year 2023, 307 billion US$, which amounts to ca. 12.3 billion US$. Or do you think 4 % is not enough?
Recital 37 [2] of the GDPR gives a definition of what an undertaking means in the context of the GDPR.
not the one who asked the questions, but I actually think 4% are not enough.
If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6% margin over - not doing it.
IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more executives should go to jail for it - And that's the C-Level Executives, because it's them which are accountable.
Problem with those things: usually it still hits the little ones harder than the big players...
Yes, however fines don’t mean anything without enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they knew an individual couldn’t afford to sue over every single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth absolutely could do this.
I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.
This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.
That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.
Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to cancel).
Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel, the prohibition on charging me for the months I didn't use it would've made this a non-issue. Hell, I'd probably still be a customer today, now that I've long ago moved back to a city with Anytime Fitness locations.
But you didn't. You clearly stated that the burden of cancelling was too high: " The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet"
This is the root of the problem. Not the "prohibition to charge for services you've subscribed to but don't use".
If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc
You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.
If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.
A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.
This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.
I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.
My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.
We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.
Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?
> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.
> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!
> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!
> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.
> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!
Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!
> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
> > Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nearly no chance to actually correct the behavior.
But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This *still* wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.
If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.
About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.
Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.
Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.
Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.
People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.
People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.
> Russia will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> Companies will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People at the park will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People in cars will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
I don't disagree with any of these. We as a society, should punish bad behavior! (Note that the as a society is a critical component of my agreement here)
Is forgetting to cancel a recurring subscription a bad thing, that should be punished? Does it hurt society, or exclusively that individual?
What in the world are you going on about? Continuing to pay for something that you agreed to pay for and didn't cancel is not a "punishment". If it is, that is the silliest definition of punishment I've ever heard. It is certainly not anywhere close to "hitting my dog". So I fixed it for you:
> People who don't cancel subscriptions will continue to pay for them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm will be late for things.
Neither of those things is an injustice.
Paying for things you agreed to pay for is not a punishment. Punishment is fining companies that do not proactively cancel subscriptions on your behalf. You can set a reminder to cancel something (on a computer). Any argument you can make for a computer being used can apply just as well to the consumer as to the business.
It is very well known in basically every sphere of human endeavor that the less you do something, the less competent you will be at that thing. This doesn't need a citation – this is how humans work.
The problem is that there are still huge amounts of services with awful dark patterns out there. There’s an instagram gym clothing brand called Fabletics which is £55/month for their vip tier. They auto subscribe you with a purchase (and when I say buried in the fine print, I really do mean _buried_ in the fine print). To cancel, you have to do it between the 1st and the 4th of the month, and it’s a multi page form where every page is a confirmation that is designed to look like you have unsubscribed . When services are still doing this there needs to be some rules.
People can leave their computers behind for vacations and try to not use their devices during said vacations or small sabbaticals, you know.
Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.
The status quo is equal footing. Profits and companies are not being put over people when you require people to cancel a subscription that they created. To claim that is to assign almost zero agency to "people".
Forcing companies to do this would absolutely be putting people over profits and companies, however.
Depends. When you remove the "1-click cancel" mandate, it's profits over people, for example.
We had this. You had to fax the company a petition for cancellation before 7 to 2 days to renewal, and call them too to set this in motion. If you fail, you can try next year. Now, they have to integrate with e-gov, and I can cancel my membership from e-gov with one click.
If the integration fails, it's their head under the guillotine, not mine.
I don't think "people over profits" a bad approach. We don't live to feed corporations to feed us junk in return. Corporations shall be there for us improve our lives, if we let them. We are not their slaves.
Yes, I am saying all this in full agreement that there should be requirements for cancellations to be as easy as subscribing, which we have. That said...
Companies are a collection of people. They are not your slaves either.
Saying "I want there to be a mandate that companies auto-cancel my subs if I don't use them" can be re-phrased as "I want a developer somewhere (or a team of them) to be forced (under threat of punishment) to write a bunch of code so that I don't need to do something which is very arguably my responsibility".
Interesting take. I kinda take this a bit personal because I forgot multiple times about some subscriptions I had and I think I have my finances well under order.
I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc.
I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.
If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.
Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?
Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.
Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.
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.
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.
It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration your searches
> Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?
The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.
Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.
Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.
For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.
Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.
When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.
I don't use Kagi anymore but the main thing I miss is the absence of "Popular products" which is completely useless and comes up far too often when using Google to find retail products and black listing websites from the search results. Outside of that, the results were largely similar.
Quality search results while not making myself a google user. De-googling is quite important to me. Besides that, basically what everyone else said; it upranks or downranks domains based on my settings, the claude AI answers are pretty good, and the no bullshit interface.
No ads, no forced "AI summary", doesn't sell my data to anyone. There are many other quality of life features, I don't consider any of them personally indispensable except for the ability to permanently remove a site from results, which I have used a few times.
I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've never had any reason to try something else since I've started using it.
Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is not the only search engine with this feature though.
It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi because I see the token in the request url.
I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.
Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.
Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China
No, even content hosted on YouTube. Some videos are almost impossible to search for even if they are linkable via YouTube. For instance, it's almost impossible to find the video of MSNBC hosts saying they will vote for Trump if Sanders becomes the Dem candidate. First result in Yandex. Both are vehicles for state propaganda obviously.
I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium, certainly not Electron, but WebKit) but supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps, and has zero telemetry baked in and doesn't try to upsell you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase by Mozilla even at the time it was made.
Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.
This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).
I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.
So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.
> Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.
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.
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.
Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.
I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.
I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand.
If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.
It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.
The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.
Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that.
About the fair pricing:
Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :)
I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.
When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.
[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes
I live the rental only life and only when needed. That being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is getting something that is already old and with a lot of mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+ miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch every few years and you can even sell them for higher than you got them in years where the second hand market moves up.
Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.
The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.
Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.
Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.
In Europe it's law to make cancellations as easy as signing up. Also using the same methods; so if you can sign up through the web it's not allowed to only offer cancellation by registered mail that must arrive on a full moon only.
5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.)
To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).
The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.
I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.
The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.
This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than the occasional service that has such obvious and widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I struggle to think of examples of those services, where neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including cancelling cards because it was easier).
>[I]t's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it
You characterize my position exactly right. I only point out there are many options people might not use Netflix for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it.
>Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions
Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.
>like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed,
Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
> I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass
Well, I sympathize, and I've sometimes paid for subscriptions I didn't end up using too, but such is life. We don't always make the most out of what we pay for. That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
> Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.
Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.
I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.
> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).
> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.
It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.
I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.
How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.
I feel like the vast, vast majority of businesses that are conducting monetary transactions with their customers are storing, at least, their last login time.
As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.
If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?
> 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.
Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?
Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.
I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.
We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)
Kagi in the other hand is useful.
Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )
Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.
I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.
Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.
Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.
This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.
Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.
A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.
I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.
We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].
We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.
Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :)
If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.
Hey! This url and any search I do are blocked with 403 if I access it either with Tor or my VPN. Anyway I love kagi and continue to use this, but this aspect is pretty annoying.
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.
Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source, then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.
Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query results. By default it shows up automatically when it has high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it to show up by adding "?" to your query.
If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line research agent and "!code" is good and software development. Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current facts.
Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how well different models perform. They occasionally swap out default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a specific model if you want.
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.
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.
Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).
Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.
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.
Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.
You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.
They send by default an email every month when the payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just send the same email and state that the payment amount is covered by the previous month. They have really good practices at that.
Yet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I only ever see something like that with shipped goods where they might have to deal with a return + cancellation
That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.
People also forget that they're subscribed to something (or that they signed up for emails either explicitly or implicitly), so they just report to Google (or whoever) as spam. I'm sure that's why I get a lot of email (mostly in my Gmail Promotions or Updates tabs that are from companies that scanned me at some event or whatever or I ordered something from.
I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.
The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.
A thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue in absolute terms.
Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
And they don’t usually ask for number of subscribers, but number of paid subscribers. Startups have played enough games with this that investors should be able to hone in on the right numbers.
Correct, your churn would be artificially lowered, so you'd probably want to define a point where a "paused" subscription is effectively inactive and count that against churn.
It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is paused.
Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear, accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors out of money ;-)
I've had places offer to just not bill for a few months while still allowing full access or offer some steep discounts in the workflow for cancelling in attempt to reduce churn.
If you ever dealt with the business side of SaaS you know how important churn is.
Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers are expensive for many businesses to get, they have marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because it’s a cheaper way to boost your growth rate.
If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on if those deals are just delaying inevitable churn or if they are actually winning back customers. Delaying churn is just a game of spending money to make your books look better for a quarter.
Yes but it’s also a chance to convince the customer that you’re worth keeping around. Depending on your product, you might also have customers that dip in and out. Keeping them from churning, while sacrificing a little cash today, helps keep that customer from shopping around for alternatives, too.
Also, in my experiences most of those services which offered free time or heavily discounted alternatives to cancelling tend to be things which have a pretty low cost per subscriber (e.g., news sites, simple applications, not much per-user storage).
I agree with your statement but your general calculation of growth is off imho, it should be:
Growth = (New Customers Acquisition + Install Base Growth) - Churn
This also assumes that churn = Customers that leave completely and those that downgrade plans
IB growth can fuel business growth, especially during times of low new customer acquisition and or high to moderate churn
A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.
I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.
Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.
If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.
Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and something that a challenger service could possibly use (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective, it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly outgoings.
There's a separate cash flow problem on doing this, a big chuck of the expected revenue comes from people that setup the subscription and forget about it
I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)
On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
It's an interesting point, because it gets to when streaming services' content costs are paid.
Are they upfront? Or do they pay per view royalties at the end of a streaming period? Or likely mix of both, varying by each piece of content terms?
Hypothetically, if a streaming service structured most of their obligations in the form of post-view true-up's, they wouldn't have any problem doing this. And could make bank on the float between customer payment (first of month) and paying for their content (end of period).
Streaming services mostly pay for licensed content up front. That’s why video streaming is much more like a traditional tech company - high up front costs with very low marginal costs compared to streaming music companies where their costs stream linearly with their revenues
For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.
Pay for what you use streaming exists. I don't think it would work here. Paying a large sum and dividing it up by what you watch is basically back to cable tv, just with a little smarter more immediate billing -> analytics feedback for hollywood.
A change I think is necessary for consumers however is deduplication of content payments. If you subscribe to multiple services, youre paying for a license to some content multiple times, sometimes many times.
What I would like to see is more like Kagi Fair Pricing, a master payment account (like prime or movies anywhere) that has access to all your accounts, cross references where you are paying for a title multiple times, and offers a refund or credit.
The problems with per-watch pricing most come down to requiring a conscious decision each time they use your service, when you'd prefer that they be indifferent at most margins so that they don't have to be regularly reminded that oh, yeah, the amount of money they're spending on this darn this thing actually varies with how they use it.
Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and
- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99". But the extreme of this is what you actually see: one price for any usage of the service at all, which ... is a popular pricing model at consumer scales because it works?
Give it a reasonable enough price (0.99 per episode is too expensive) and add a monthly cap (can be a bit higher than the current subscription) and you've got me as a customer.
AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower than what the subscription model would pay.
A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.
When people are confronted with the actual cost, they tend to say no.
With a subscription, their head tells them that for 10 €/$ they get an infinite number of articles.
No, they get the articles that _you_ provide. But if _you_ provide only 50% of the interesting articles, as does every other provider, then approaching the ability to access 100% of interesting articles get very expensive. Just getting to 90% of the articles would cost 40€/$. And pushing that to 99% will cost 70€/$.
I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.
I do something similar and that's why I usually try to subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes it costs a little more because the services have to pay Apple, but for me, it's worth it.
Please tell me that you have at least a Bash script or Selenium workflow for this. It actually sounds like a fun project to abstract and make pluggable. It would probably require maintenance, though.
I do this when we have visiting relatives who would spend all day watching a particular cable news channel that gets them all riled up. Before they arrive, I subscribe to a different streaming service with a package that doesn’t include that channel and put its icon front and center on our TV. I then immediately cancel it so it doesn’t renew.
Yes a lot of people does this manually. But the services predate on the people that is too busy or lazy to unsubscribe and I'm afraid they are a much larger group.
I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches were actually done.
Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how ridiculuous this proposition is.
yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi.
Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.
Today, Kagi has a negative incentive to even historically track user search data (if discovered, their business would be cooked). Consequently, it's very likely they're being honest and don't.
Furthermore, they're building a sustainable business around subscription revenue.
In the event any of the above changes, they still won't have any historical data to share.
As opposed to Google, who keeps things in their vaults until the heat death of the universe.
> And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi.
Ha! You and what European data authority supporting you? Because that's the only way you'd have a chance of making headway.
Thank you for agreeing with me. Why would I bother using a VC-backed search engine today that forces me to login to use it routinely only to receive an email later saying, "An Update to our Terms of Service". And whose only way to convince me that they do not store my data is to tell me that I can "trust them." Even if I trusted them, I wouldn't trust their investors or their random late stage C suits.
>As opposed to Google
Are you willfully ignoring what I wrote in bad faith? Google had to settle a class action law suit that forced them to delete "billions of user records" and still allowed them get sued for individual claims down the road. Use kagi to search for the winston strawn summary of the case.
Here is an excercise: Open a three letter browser starting with the letter T, go to google.com and search for the life expectancy of ALS. Now close the browser.
Now tell me what google can deduce about about the real-life ethbrl with certainty and how they came by that information.
Are you hitting "New Identity" in the Tor browser, removing all cookies/sessions and creating a new circuit for each search?
In that case I guess there is not too much they can deduce aside from the type of device (desktop, mobile).
But of course, if you make more search queries without hitting "New Identity", they can piece together a lot more than that, including exactly who you are with enough time between new identities.
If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well. There is even a Hidden Service for it [1], so you don't even need to hit the clear web at any point.
If you're concerned about tying your credit card information to your searches, you can just use a prepaid debit card or crypto to pay [2].
>If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well.
I have to remind you we're talking about preventing Kagi or Google from tracking you. This suggestion makes no sense when you're forced to sign-in to Kagi to use it meaningfully as your default search engine anyway no matter where you're connecting from.
Your first two paragraphs describe a use case that is way more convenient than your last paragraph, and most crypto wallets have most likely come into contact with exchanges that have the user's kyc data to begin with.
Again, you seem to be missing the point here. Those "billions of user records" are the users who thought they were not being tracked by using incognito mode. All the other users who didn't care about being tracked one way or the other are irrelevant to the use case we're discussing.
Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company whose core business product is tracking... makes you more comfortable you're not being tracked than an alternative with a subscription model?
>Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company whose core business product is tracking
I'm doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that a user still has tools in their disposal to prevent a company whose core business is tracking from tracking them as long as said company does not require the user to sign in with PII info.
When you sign in with Kagi, your only protection is to "trust them". Kagi's next move should be to allow mail-in-cash for account activation to back up their privacy intent if they require user sign-in, like some other privacy-focused services allow.
> there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free.
You’ve specified the difference. One company is actively trading your data as its core business, for profit. One isn’t.
I find your position baffling.
No, one says it isn't at some specific point in time. Some people here seem to want to believe the last decade of bait amd switch VC backed startups never happened (often times through no fault of the founders).
>one is trading your data
As I mentiomed in my other comment, the user has tools at their disposal to prevent google figuring out its "your" data. No such tools exist when you're forced to sign into Kagi with your credit card.
Your position is baffling. You think that Google, who maintains every search you’ve ever made, including correlating them across every Gmail account you have, and who routinely provides this search data to authorities, as well as sells access to this data is somehow more safe to use than a company based in Europe, who are funded off of a subscription model, whom are not VC funded even though you claim that, and who’s entire sales strategy is that they don’t sell your data or even retain it.
Nothing in the comment you're responding to says anything about me using Google search or Gmail. In other comments I'm simple comparing the use case of using google search with an obfuscated connection and without ever signing into a google account with the use case of having to sign into Kagi. In that respect, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you're responding to another comment of mine please respond to that comment so I can better understand your point.
Nothing in any of your comments indicates that you are using an obfuscated connection to search Google at all. In that case there is little difference to using Google signed in or not, you are still trackable across numerous devices and your searches are correlated. So being signed into kagi has little difference besides them now being less incentivized to sell your information or track you in any manner.
you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.
People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.
Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search. Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.
"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.
I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.
I don't doubt you but this life experience is so far from my own I struggle to understand what you use that much search volume for. I maybe search for 4-5 things a day (based on my one stint paying for Kagi and their usage reporting and trying to use it everywhere, and this was before AI products were able to search on your behalf) which is what led me to cancel, I was usually not getting the paid plan value from it. A large amount of my searches today are often just fancy autocompletes for specific URLS on already known domains that I probably could have accessed without a search engine at all.
Do you pay for ChatGPT with built in web search? I’ve been paying for ChatGPT for two years. I just started using the ChatGPT extension for Chrome for search and it is so much better than Chrome.
According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.
Date (UTC) AI Tokens Searches
Feb 5, 2025 0 64
Feb 4, 2025 0 43
Feb 3, 2025 0 19
Feb 2, 2025 0 24
Feb 1, 2025 0 19
They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting :)
Similar stats for me. It’s become an invaluable tool, sometimes I’ll use another browser that’s has Google as default and immediately notice how much worse it is — all the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better… with the benefit of more personalization
I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.
It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".
My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.
> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now
Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.
I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.
On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.
As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.
You are really underestimating how many users just forget they have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at all.
There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.
I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a little bit like how insurance is priced.
I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go / per API call / search pricing model... to something that if I use it just once, I pay full price for a month. Same rationale for AI in my IDE, I'm waiting for the pricing models to change
Plugins will never match the possibilities of a deep integration. Those who build or fork VS code want the monthly fee because they make way more per customer
The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.
But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.
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
We would like to eventually offer everyone an API credit stipend with their subscription. Our APIs should get plenty of love this year, so please stay tuned.
> also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.
Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.
Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.
But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
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)?
My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes the feeling by factor of 10.
But then it becomes a question of where exactly draw the line? And if you're going to do that, why not just charge per search so that you're not wasting money on searches you aren't using? Now you just have metered billing.
We've seen how that plays out with cloud computing: a few people wayyyy overpay and subsidise a lot of people on the free/cheap tiers
10 free searches a month would work well for me, I think. A small free tier might be enough to get me to pay for Kagi. Currently I'm just not sure I'm missing anything and I don't have a way to test that, last I checked.
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.
Really. In the case of Google it’s even deeper for me. For some reason the ruination of their search engine feels like a betrayal for which Kagi’s proliferation feels like justice.
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
/*
Hide pre-translated webpages.
"sri-group" is main result, "__srgi" are sub results.
You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
*/
:is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
display: none !important;
}*
That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)
The chatter in search right now is related to AI-assisted answers, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile — local results — 0 from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of code. We’re constantly working on search.
In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.
> The conversation about and innovation in the future of search right now is related to AI-assisted answers
I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.
But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.
The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
I also like traditional results, which is how I got into this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the conversation right now is about AI-assisted answers, and just revised to make that more clear what I referring to.
In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.
We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).
I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at the end of a query.
One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.
I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.
On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.
It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.
I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.
If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
> If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.
This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a backup (there are a handful of large websites that only allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular), but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest, and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.
It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.
What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.
fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.
- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.
- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.
- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.
All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.
I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.
Same. Kagi has been a breath of fresh air after suffering years of enshittification with other search engines whom are much more interested in your clickstream than providing you with quality results.
Same here. I don't often feel the need to shill for paid products but Kagi is so good that I want to do everything I can to make sure it sticks around. It's like air in the sense that it's easy to forget how much I need it until I suddenly don't have it lol
I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.
If you're comfortable sharing, what is your job/role, how does Kagi help with that (or is it more of a personal tool), and do you find it more helpful than something like Google + Claude (what I currently use and love)?
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.)
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.
511 comments
[ 55.8 ms ] story [ 505 ms ] threadI would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.
- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)
- Proactively investigate and check
- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results
I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.
For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]
(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
EDIT: formatting
Recital 37 [2] of the GDPR gives a definition of what an undertaking means in the context of the GDPR.
[1] https://www.munich-business-school.de/en/l/business-studies-...
[2] https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-37/
If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6% margin over - not doing it.
IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more executives should go to jail for it - And that's the C-Level Executives, because it's them which are accountable.
Problem with those things: usually it still hits the little ones harder than the big players...
This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.
That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.
They problem is the cancellation process, not "they shouldn't charge me if I'm not using it".
No, the problem would be moot if the cancellation process was as easy as the sign up process. And I think the US finally got that law
But you didn't. You clearly stated that the burden of cancelling was too high: " The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet"
This is the root of the problem. Not the "prohibition to charge for services you've subscribed to but don't use".
If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc
You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.
If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.
A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.
This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.
I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.
Yours truely, Mr Middle Age Curmudgeon
Negatory. USA.
We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.
Actually, I'm pretty sure OpenAI Operator can already do that, but I don't pay $200 for Pro so I can't confirm.
- my agent
> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.
> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!
> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!
> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.
> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!
Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!
> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nearly no chance to actually correct the behavior.
But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This *still* wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.
If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.
About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.
Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.
Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.
Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.
People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.
People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.
> Companies will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People at the park will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People in cars will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
I don't disagree with any of these. We as a society, should punish bad behavior! (Note that the as a society is a critical component of my agreement here)
Is forgetting to cancel a recurring subscription a bad thing, that should be punished? Does it hurt society, or exclusively that individual?
If not, why make this argument?
> People who don't cancel subscriptions will continue to pay for them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm will be late for things.
Neither of those things is an injustice.
Paying for things you agreed to pay for is not a punishment. Punishment is fining companies that do not proactively cancel subscriptions on your behalf. You can set a reminder to cancel something (on a computer). Any argument you can make for a computer being used can apply just as well to the consumer as to the business.
It is very well known in basically every sphere of human endeavor that the less you do something, the less competent you will be at that thing. This doesn't need a citation – this is how humans work.
I also think Kagi is great for doing this.
Punishing companies because they don't do this is another thing entirely, which is what the comment I was replying to suggested.
Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.
I think its great if Kagi proactively chooses to do this themselves.
I think it bad if you force companies to do this.
Hard questions.
Forcing companies to do this would absolutely be putting people over profits and companies, however.
Depends. When you remove the "1-click cancel" mandate, it's profits over people, for example.
We had this. You had to fax the company a petition for cancellation before 7 to 2 days to renewal, and call them too to set this in motion. If you fail, you can try next year. Now, they have to integrate with e-gov, and I can cancel my membership from e-gov with one click.
If the integration fails, it's their head under the guillotine, not mine.
I don't think "people over profits" a bad approach. We don't live to feed corporations to feed us junk in return. Corporations shall be there for us improve our lives, if we let them. We are not their slaves.
Companies are a collection of people. They are not your slaves either.
Saying "I want there to be a mandate that companies auto-cancel my subs if I don't use them" can be re-phrased as "I want a developer somewhere (or a team of them) to be forced (under threat of punishment) to write a bunch of code so that I don't need to do something which is very arguably my responsibility".
I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc. I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.
If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.
Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.
The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.
Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.
Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.
Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.
When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.
Also, it's built in that sites with a ton of ads are down-ranked.
I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've never had any reason to try something else since I've started using it.
Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is not the only search engine with this feature though.
Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.
Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China
Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.
So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.
The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.
> Their entire business model is to know who you are.
this is literally the opposite of reality
Thank you for your support.
- Zac
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.
If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.
It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.
The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.
About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.
[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes
The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.
Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.
I think that depends on your country. I’ve never had an issue cancelling my gym membership.
https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...
I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.
The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.
That's fine.
You characterize my position exactly right. I only point out there are many options people might not use Netflix for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it.
>Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions
Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.
>like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed,
Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
> I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass
Well, I sympathize, and I've sometimes paid for subscriptions I didn't end up using too, but such is life. We don't always make the most out of what we pay for. That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.
I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.
> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).
> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.
It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.
How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.
Mind-boggling to me that you'd even have to do that. I get instant notifications for all purchases, we're in 2025.
Once they stole my number and 10 minutes later I had already contested the charge, blocked the card and requested a new one.
Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
Kagi in the other hand is useful.
Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )
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".
Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.
This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.
I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.
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.
Hint: you can use Google in private mode. And unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.
That's like driving without light and seat belt. Should be very obvious to every HN reader, that a content (ad) blocker is the first thing you install
We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].
We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.
Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :) If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...
Note that URL is 403, from Tor browser.
Works fine from non-Tor.
(I'm now experimenting with the Kagi hidden service.)
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.
Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query results. By default it shows up automatically when it has high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it to show up by adding "?" to your query.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line research agent and "!code" is good and software development. Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current facts.
Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how well different models perform. They occasionally swap out default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a specific model if you want.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html
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.
> LLM Apis...
Yeah exactly, ChatGPT doesn't have this option for their web interface either, only for API. For the same reason.
Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.
[0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv` installed)
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.
Just for warning, you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results, but generally the experience with Kagi is much better.
And can do so by adding !g to a Kagi query, just like on DDG.
You know, I once ordered takeout from the other side of the country because I had too much privacy on my search engine...
I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149
But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining
(I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)
The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is paused.
Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear, accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors out of money ;-)
Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers are expensive for many businesses to get, they have marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because it’s a cheaper way to boost your growth rate.
If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on if those deals are just delaying inevitable churn or if they are actually winning back customers. Delaying churn is just a game of spending money to make your books look better for a quarter.
IB growth can fuel business growth, especially during times of low new customer acquisition and or high to moderate churn
Disclosure: I work at Kagi
(historically not so important to companies in practice, but it sure ought to be)
Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.
Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)
On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
Are they upfront? Or do they pay per view royalties at the end of a streaming period? Or likely mix of both, varying by each piece of content terms?
Hypothetically, if a streaming service structured most of their obligations in the form of post-view true-up's, they wouldn't have any problem doing this. And could make bank on the float between customer payment (first of month) and paying for their content (end of period).
For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.
Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.
I was flummoxed the other day when I talked with someone who was a content equity trader -- I didn't even realize that class of finance existed.
A change I think is necessary for consumers however is deduplication of content payments. If you subscribe to multiple services, youre paying for a license to some content multiple times, sometimes many times.
What I would like to see is more like Kagi Fair Pricing, a master payment account (like prime or movies anywhere) that has access to all your accounts, cross references where you are paying for a title multiple times, and offers a refund or credit.
Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and
- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99". But the extreme of this is what you actually see: one price for any usage of the service at all, which ... is a popular pricing model at consumer scales because it works?
I believe instead that the future for textual content is mass syndication, just like it worked out for video content and audio content.
Totally worth the $20 or whatever.
Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
> No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search.
So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.
I block the shit (a user preference with some good easy options), I up rank my favourites and pin Wikipedia.
I’m happily paying for a family plan.
Today, Kagi has a negative incentive to even historically track user search data (if discovered, their business would be cooked). Consequently, it's very likely they're being honest and don't.
Furthermore, they're building a sustainable business around subscription revenue.
In the event any of the above changes, they still won't have any historical data to share.
As opposed to Google, who keeps things in their vaults until the heat death of the universe.
> And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi.
Ha! You and what European data authority supporting you? Because that's the only way you'd have a chance of making headway.
Thank you for agreeing with me. Why would I bother using a VC-backed search engine today that forces me to login to use it routinely only to receive an email later saying, "An Update to our Terms of Service". And whose only way to convince me that they do not store my data is to tell me that I can "trust them." Even if I trusted them, I wouldn't trust their investors or their random late stage C suits.
>As opposed to Google
Are you willfully ignoring what I wrote in bad faith? Google had to settle a class action law suit that forced them to delete "billions of user records" and still allowed them get sued for individual claims down the road. Use kagi to search for the winston strawn summary of the case.
Here is an excercise: Open a three letter browser starting with the letter T, go to google.com and search for the life expectancy of ALS. Now close the browser.
Now tell me what google can deduce about about the real-life ethbrl with certainty and how they came by that information.
In that case I guess there is not too much they can deduce aside from the type of device (desktop, mobile).
But of course, if you make more search queries without hitting "New Identity", they can piece together a lot more than that, including exactly who you are with enough time between new identities.
If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well. There is even a Hidden Service for it [1], so you don't even need to hit the clear web at any point.
If you're concerned about tying your credit card information to your searches, you can just use a prepaid debit card or crypto to pay [2].
[1]: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...
[2]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
I have to remind you we're talking about preventing Kagi or Google from tracking you. This suggestion makes no sense when you're forced to sign-in to Kagi to use it meaningfully as your default search engine anyway no matter where you're connecting from.
Your first two paragraphs describe a use case that is way more convenient than your last paragraph, and most crypto wallets have most likely come into contact with exchanges that have the user's kyc data to begin with.
I'm doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that a user still has tools in their disposal to prevent a company whose core business is tracking from tracking them as long as said company does not require the user to sign in with PII info.
When you sign in with Kagi, your only protection is to "trust them". Kagi's next move should be to allow mail-in-cash for account activation to back up their privacy intent if they require user sign-in, like some other privacy-focused services allow.
You’ve specified the difference. One company is actively trading your data as its core business, for profit. One isn’t. I find your position baffling.
No, one says it isn't at some specific point in time. Some people here seem to want to believe the last decade of bait amd switch VC backed startups never happened (often times through no fault of the founders).
>one is trading your data
As I mentiomed in my other comment, the user has tools at their disposal to prevent google figuring out its "your" data. No such tools exist when you're forced to sign into Kagi with your credit card.
Your position is completely devoid of logic.
It's the same with test driving a car: If you don't like it, then don't buy it.
"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.
Use LLM to sift through search results (including all the crap clickbait) and find the thing you're really looking for.
A bit like perplexity does though I run it locally with OpenWebUI and SearXNG.
It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".
Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.
As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.
What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not obvious to me.
For VS code compatible plugins checkout Cline/Roo or just search for AI in the extensions.
But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.
I don't think you can guarantee that the price will go up. If I look at the API costs today, they do not have a sliding scale
> also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.
Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.
Search = advertisements
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
We've seen how that plays out with cloud computing: a few people wayyyy overpay and subsidise a lot of people on the free/cheap tiers
Keep up the good work guys!
I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites suppressed in search results!
Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.
What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".
Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:
I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.
In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.
I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.
But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.
Also, I have no problem with Kagi -- we are actually investors in it. The more competition in the search market, the better.
The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.
If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.
Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.
The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.
We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).
One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.
I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.
On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022
They currently "support" safari currently by redirecting the searches that go to your chosen search engine to kagi.com with an extension.
If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766725
What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.
fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.
- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.
- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.
All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.
I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.
Good job Kagi et al!
I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.
What I love most about this fair pricing is it makes it was more appealing to encourage my friends to give it a try. Thank you, Kagi!
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.)
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.
At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in analogue computers is today.