Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month | Kagi Blog
Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month | Kagi Blog
This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).
Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
- Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
- "Lenses", which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
- All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type "!yt" in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
- Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi's capabilities.
Oh sick!! I was already on the $10/month plan. This is great news!!!
30Same. Looks like you and I both will be getting unlimited searches now. :D
10Samesies :P This is awesome. Love being a user and not the product. EDIT:
With the redirector extension you can import the following to help with muscle memory.
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-09-22T00:00:00.631Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Google->Kagi", "exampleUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks&sca_esv=011101111&source=dv&ei=CN", "exampleResult": "https://kagi.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks", "error": null, "includePattern": ""^(?:https?):\\/\\/(?:www\\.)?google\\.com(\\/?$|(\\/search\\?q=.*?(?=[&])))"", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Redirect Kagi", "redirectUrl": "https://kagi.com$1", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] }, ] }9
Probably a good pricing decision. To avoid hitting the 300/month usage I kept DDG as default and only used Kagi for more complex searches. If I upgrade to this I could then keep Kagi as default.
24How does ddg compare? I've tried kagi, but didn't find it much better than ddg. Perhaps I should try again.
2Similar to what other people mentioned, I find it good at filtering out the obvious SEO spam. Otherwise the top 3 results of a search aren't really different.
3
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you'll be logging your own data. You'll have complete control, it's significantly cheaper, and it's far more private without having to even login.
14"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.
20No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
14Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That's very expensive to do. There's two options as to how to pay for it:
- Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
- Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do
The latter is what people mean when they say "you're the product". The advertisers are the customers.
self-host a searx instance
Two totally different things.
Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.
10Kagi doesn't index, it's Google results as a proxy. That's literally what Searx does, and it's free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn't, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they're profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.
Searx could use Kagi though.
Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi's ToS. You're running a self hosted proxy through a service that's just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.
"If you aren't paying for something, you are the product" sounds nice, but isn't true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.
Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn't work in private search.
2
what search engines are actually good these days?
because that's the problem, they aren't
search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
I don't think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
8Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Explain how they're better.
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login.
Just because something requires a login, doesn't mean searches are logged. That's something you and I simply can't know.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported
Explain.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance
And you easy do you think this is for the average Joe?
Unless you can actually explain your points, you should stop arguing in bad faith.
7Yeah if you literally just scrolled down, I elaborated on everything. Keep your "bad faith" bullshit to yourself when you're doing it to me. Quit the astroturfing. Also yes, having an account means they objectively can track you since queries are coming from an account. There is zero guarantee they are not logging. You are shilling. "If it's free then you're the product" is just not a thing that's true in reality. DDG has ads based off of search keywords. Wikipedia is entirely donations. Services exists without the user being the product.
1
EDIT BEINGS HERE
So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded "enshittification", Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.
This does not mean that it's not problematic that their code is closed-source.
EDIT ENDS HERE
I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.
For one, it's based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.
Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.
It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
14What's wrong with simply switching as soon as enshittification starts? You're not making any permanent commitments to it.
12Permanently Deleted
11Easy. Kagi cares about the quality of their product giving you the customer good results. Their product is a search engine. Google doesn't care to make their search engine better currently. Their product is ad placement and sales. You are not their customer.
Kagi already exceeds Google at being a search engine, at this time.
11
There is no law in the requiring data logging in the US, nor is it required to comply with FBI security data requests.
and beat out gag orders over the subject. It is also deemed a violation of the first amendment.
3
This is awesome! I always wanted to try out Kagi but was not huge fan of the original pricing model. I think I might have to give Kagi a try now!
14Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?
14@sculd asked the same question further down and got a couple of good responses.
4Seconding this
2
Does Kagi support languages outside of English? One issue I have with DDG is the lack of results outside English sites. If Kagi is similar then it would be a big issue.
13It does, I search in languages other than English quite often and the results are still high quality IMO.
10Permanently Deleted
10Language is not a region, see: https://kagifeedback.org/d/89-language-vs-region/31
7
It sea4ches in different languages, but there is no way to force language of the results. Instead, ot tries to be "smart" and uses languages of the region. So it has the same problem Google and Bing does: giving you results in random languages outside of language region (or in multi-lingual regions), even when request is explicitly in language A.
There is a feature request to implement this setting, but not much hope to have this soon.
On this note, if someone knows of a search engine that allows specifying language of results, please let me know :)
7
Awesome! The AI summarizer is very useful, and it gives quality search results from my experience with the free trial. $10 a month still seems a little high for a search engine, though I'm definitely eyeing it more now...
Hopefully we see more competition in the future with paid search engines, this seems to be new territory where everyone is still pretty unsure of the right pricing. I think $5 a month is going to be the sweet spot for me.
12Same here. I did the trial 300 search thing and was very happy with that. Settling on the fiver a month plan as I can't justify a tenner. Plus I realised that I don't do much more than about 300 searches.
It's so refreshing to not have 'sponsored' posts or adverts in front of your results.
8
That's a curious project and I hope they succeed. But I have to wonder. On their "Why pay for search engines" page, they state the following:
Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use.
So, will they dial the price back up or do they currently just hope that most people pay for the "unlimited searches per month" plan but use it less than an average user would?
11They probably haven't updated the page. This blog post says:
With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.
So it sounds like they have made lots of efficiencies to make it cheaper per search. I'm sure more subscribers helps as well.
But I'm really curious about the "new search sources" part. Where do they source their searches from?
17Their operations are very small scale still. I imagine as the economy of scale does its thing, that price/search will fall drastically.
2They probably have a lot of potential infrastructure savings. $1/80 searches is an absolutely astronomical cost.
I'm imagining there are quite a few gains they can get by way of optimization, different technologies, and optimizing hot paths to bring that number down.
It really depends how they built this thing. For instance, if they built this on the AWS ecosystem, using more than straight compute/K8, their costs are going to be an actual order of magnitude higher than if they didn't.
2
Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.
9I'm intrigued, but I don't want to login to a search engine :/
8100% this. I'm willing to pay for searches, but I'm not willing to get myself tracked and pay for the privilege.
If they did some sort of microtransaction thing, like send a small amount of monero, get a couple searches for a session. That work for me. Then it would be completely ephemeral.
If they worked out a deal with mullvad where connections from all that get low priority searches, that would also work. Cuz I trust movad to be an intermediary to obscure the payer from the search.
If you could pay them and get an onion URL, for your paid searches. It's not perfect, but it would at least break the connection between the payer and the searches. Though it's more bulky and easier to correlate multiple searches to a single person at least would be a start.
2
Yesss! Immediately upgraded to duo unlimited for me and my partner.
8Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.
7Ah this is fantastic! I've only been using Kagi for a few months, and have been concerned about running into the search limit, but this means I can go and set it as the default everywhere now.
6That is actually great thing for now was using you.com might finally move
5So how is you.com? I tried using it several months ago was not impressed with the results. That time brave and ddg was better.
2to be suprising works kinda fine though still sometimes needs to fall back to other search engine. Though using AI chat is great with Pro plan.
1
Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!
5Hmm I hope this one will live on. I remember Neeva which never let their users know that they could sign up and then shut down because they didn't have enough income..
3This is fantastic. I've been a $5 Kagi user for a few months and have been really enjoying it. The only issue has been that sometimes when I'm working on a project I need to blow through a ton of similar queries to find what I'm looking for; I've been forced to switch back to google for those. Now I've upgraded and am going full Kagi.
2