Ask HN: Will Kagi's subscription cost reduce with enough subscribers?
I asked Kagi (free account) and the gist was no. Is there an upper limit in which subscriptions cover all future searches from all future subscribers? What is that number? Or does the scaling up always cost more to deliver?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] threadThey also added in AI chat at no additional cost, charging based on usage, while everyone else is trying to charge $20 for that alone.
They are pretty transparent on billing, at least for their highest cost items. At the start they would show you how much your searches cost them vs your bill. At one point I cost them more than I paid, so I tossed them some extra money to not be a drain. Now they show how much you cost them in AI tokens, and if you cost them more than you paid, you pay the difference, which feels fair. I think I use the Assistant a lot and only ever use $1-2 in a month.
With search, it did seem like scale came with per-search savings, but my hope with that was it created more margin for them to be healthy, since it didn’t seem like they had much based on what they showed in the settings. And now AI is eating into those margins a bit. I’m pretty happy with how they have handled all that. It’s probably the best $10 I spend each month.
Are there any examples of businesses becoming so successful with the sign-up to a subscription model they lower the prices (would have been a better ask)?