I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
I apologize if this is old news, but I just noticed it. It looks like Kagi has added Fediverse Forums as a default Web search option.
Not using Kagi because its an American company is valid. But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product. There is still a transaction with a free product.
Kagi is not free because they respect your privacy and don’t sell your data.
I’d happily pay for search, but Kagi is way too expensive.
10 searches a day, for $5/month? (US)
Like, that is way too much.
I can receive thousands and send thousands of emails per day for that price. Is search really that much more expensive?
Have the same issue with them. I recently churned from Kagi after being a paying Pro customer. 10,-/month is simply too much. I’m paying for email (1,-/month) and web hosting (1,-/month) and web search should be in that price range to make it an attractive offer for people.
I wrote to Kagi saying as much when I churned (also criticizing that most of their changelog messages are about LLM updates for “Ultimate” customers), but they responded saying that they believe in their offer and that the trajectory of new users signing up gives them confidence.
I am, however, not willing to shell out Streaming Service level pricing (services that stream hundreds of GB to me every month) for some web searches.
As much as it pains me due to Brave being involved in the whole crypto scam business and their CEO apparently being another a**hole tech fascist, I am using Brave Search for now. Its results were not inferior when I compared them to Kagi and I don’t need 95% of all the extra fluff that Kagi offers.
As soon as there’s an offer for private search results with their own index that is not censored nor ad-driven, that company (maybe Kagi!) will have my money. But it needs to be commodity-priced like mail or hosting.
$10/m is unlimited searches though…
And yeah, searches are actually quite expensive. There’s a LOT of infrastructure that goes into making something unique with your own search engine that isn’t just a wrapper over Google.
The actual compute cost per search, in 2024, was $0.0125. Kagi states they want to keep Costa below $0.015 per search, but their search partners are a major expense.
That ofc ignores all the supporting infra, devs, support…etc that goes into making it all possible.
The business model just doesn’t make sense then (using search partners).
Because $60, let alone $120 US, a year is far more than most people would be willing to pay.
Dunno what to say, it’s just more than most people can justify paying for the service.
I’m gonna stick with DuckDuckGo and the newly free mullvad cached search
I mean, the business model works? They make money, they pay staff, and they are growing.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, people have price sensitivity of course. You are projecting yours onto “everyone”, is it not a successful business?
There’s a niche they cater to, if you are not that niche then you are not that niche. Doesn’t mean the niche doesn’t exist.
Sure, but I’m still feeling like complaining that there isn’t a business that’s made affordable pay-to-search a thing. (That I know of)
I’m not taking back that $120 USD/year for search is way more than most people would be willing to pay
Though yeah, I suppose saying their business model isn’t working was hyperbolic, I must admit.
Maybe. They use several other indexes as their backend so they have to pay microsoft for every search
I have donated €1500 to opensource software projects and paid a whopping €7 for software. These (privacy respecting) projects got my money because they weren’t transaction based. Capitalism is not the only way.
I don’t use them or never read their privacy policy so i don’t know. But it’s not because it’s a paid service that company won’t use your data to sell it for more profit. That’s EXTRA profit for them, so why the hell not. And them being based in the US means I already can’t trust them with their poor privacy laws.
Sure, but they don’t (their privacy policy is exemplary). They have a whole shpiel about their business model. Just few weeks back they released a feature that makes it technically impossible for them to see who did searches, so no trust is needed anymore. They implemented a very novel protocol, quite cool.
I have doubts considering they are an american company, but I want to see them succeed. Plus, they are remote, so at least a good chunk of the income taxes from salaries are going outside the US.
It’s a shame because there are good American businesses that are affected by this. There are companies that I respect. But it is what it is.
Yeah, I agree. In general I will personally try to evaluate if the good that comes from a company succeeding outweighs the fact it’s a US company. I won’t use a dogmatic approach, but I will definitely be careful to choose even more carefully than before.
There are plenty of paid products that do not respect your privacy and sell your data.
And there’s free products that do respect your privacy and don’t make you the product. They are community products.
For instance I offer my bandwidth and storage to thousands of strangers to share torrents and they do the same to me. No secondhand transactions happening.
That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.