Note that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago):
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
I would love for more companies to get profitable and remain small-ish.
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
PartiallyTyped · 12m ago
That's a very common approach to dealing with tech, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.
jaggederest · 3h ago
I'm assuming they're somewhere north of $5m ARR and that's not a tiny number, even at a thoroughly sane P/E value you're looking at $50m+ of company value.
pjerem · 2h ago
I somehow doubt the usual approximations are working here.
Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands.
But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
esseph · 2h ago
Would you mind explaining how you came to that number? I'm intrigued. Genuinely.
frabcus · 2h ago
Looks like the assumption is $100 / year for each user, which with 50k users makes the $5 million ARR.
Then you have to pick a finger in the air multiplier for the value of the business. A stockmarket listed SaaS company that isn't over-inflated might be 10x the revenue, so that would be $50 million valuation.
Kagi is small, but it must still have good margins. So maybe really it is 5x revenue in value, depends on lots of things! Who selling to, and predictions for long term growth.
ls-a · 1h ago
The small team is going to burnout soon. I checked there hiring description and it says something around the lines of expect a lot of work with little rest.
GlacierFox · 5m ago
Oh, so like, any small, growing company then...
obtusifolia · 1h ago
Could you share a source for that? I checked a couple of their openings (e.g. [1]) and they didn't say anything like that.
"ruthless communication habits" tells you all you need to know, and this is exactly why you'd put something like this into your job ad.
eviks · 3h ago
Search isn't that business since staying small means you won't be able to create a good index of the world. And you won't have enough resources for your browser.
patchymcnoodles · 2h ago
For me it is a great index, much better than all the alternatives. Especially against Google that is now filled with AI and Ads. Sometimes so bad, you really have to scroll down, to get to the first non-Ad link.
maelito · 1h ago
But it's not their index. Without Google or bing, they fall.
It has. But in my experience their own index is rarely used
> All results from external indexes.
The above is something I see all the time when using Kagi.
ulrikrasmussen · 2h ago
Why? I think that's an extraordinary claim.
eviks · 2h ago
Because it's expensive, and kagi still doesn't have one? And the browser is very incomplete? This is all pretty basic, how many global Web indices do you think exist?
tigroferoce · 1h ago
I agree for the index, much less for the browser. I'm using Orion since a few months and beside some occasiona bugs I wouldn't ask anything more. If it was open source it would be perfect.
On the index side I agree, I think they are using other people indexes so far, I don't know if they are thinking about building one themselves.
Same for LLM, but I think that there the problem is even worse.
0_gravitas · 3h ago
And yet, somehow, they've managed quite well :^)
eviks · 2h ago
They haven't, but also that wasn't the argument
decimalenough · 2h ago
Huh? Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point, to the point that 50k people are willingly paying $10/mo extra for it.
Obviously they don't have the ancillary services (Maps etc), but for just searching, Kagi is far more likely to surface useful results instead of just the highest bidder. Compare a search like "us esta" for a clear demonstration.
eviks · 2h ago
Huh indeed, you're talking about yet another argument, but just as wrong as the previous pivot:
First search result for "us esta" in Google is "https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta", same as in kagi, is that your objectivite fail at coming up with a simple metric?
decimalenough · 2h ago
Are you using an ad blocker or something? For me it's the 11th (!) link on mobile, far below the fold.
lolc · 1h ago
Can confirm, official page is first result in Kagi and below the fold in Google for me.
robertlagrant · 1h ago
For me on desktop it was 3 giant ads but then the first real link was that one.
cyberax · 1h ago
Might be location-dependent. I'm on a trip in Turkey, and the corretct link to US ESTA is the first result. However, if I switch to a VPN to my home, I get garbage for the first 5 results.
>Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point
I'm not entirely sure what "objectively superior" is even supposed to mean in the context of a search engine, or how this follows from having 50k users, but that ceases to be an even remotely plausible statement if you've ever attempted to get good non-English search results.
cyberax · 1h ago
Kagi is a meta-search engine, they don't have their own index for the whole Internet (they do for a small subset of it).
bbarnett · 1h ago
Yes, they pay per search when using others, so I guess the best strategy is to court devs, then index tech sites on your own.
Let others handle rarer queries.
Unearned5161 · 3h ago
I love Kagi, and have been a proud user for almost a year now. Lately, however, the more I read about Vlad and the variety of things the company is working on, the more I get worried. My (potentially naive) hope is that more companies enter this sector of paid search engines and the competition helps iron out the kinks. I want nothing more than a good set of options to choose from.
erlend_sh · 3h ago
I’d be much more at ease with their long term prospects if they begun the process of transitioning to a cooperative or steward-ownership, so that they’re less at risk of CEO-capture.
SllX · 1h ago
I mean I'm fine with them as they are now, corporate-structure-wise. What happens if Kagi starts to suck? I stop paying for it and move on with my life, so rather than worrying about what could happen, I'll just enjoy it for what it is now.
If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
dkh · 3h ago
Are you just worried about his/their divided attention or are there specific projects that concern you?
Unearned5161 · 2h ago
I'm worried about certain projects, like maps, which while pretty, I still never use because it lacks basic functions like stackable filters when searching for restaurants, or navigation of any sort.
Also am worried about the move to mail, I already have fastmail, and kagi would need to create a heck of a mail client for me to even consider switching. I'd much rather have a company that does search very well, a company that does mail very well, and a good communication between the two.
And I also have less tangible worries about Vlad's demeanor when I see some of his writing in the feedback forum or discord. It comes across as ambitious but not very circumspect, but maybe that's what's necessary to make it in this sector. I won't pretend to have enough experience to offer much opinion on the matter, all I can say is that its unsettling at times.
bpbp-mango · 18m ago
Oh yeah, maps is really poor. I have to use google still.
maelito · 1h ago
I contacted the CEO to tell him more about my projet cartes.app but they were not interested. I don't understand why they have such a bad map.
mr_tombuben · 2h ago
Some people might have issue with their push into LLM AIs with their Assistant. I personally don’t care for it and am happy that by not using it I’m not subsidising other peoples use of the paid APIs they use. But I’ve seen some people take issue with the development time being taken up by it at all.
vczf · 1m ago
I’m a newish Kagi user and I find myself using the LLM about as frequently as search itself.
Sometimes I search for things I know I am looking for. Other times I don’t know quite what I’m looking for or I know in advance that I’m not likely to find it—so I chuck it at Llama 4 Maverick and it usually gives me something useful.
I had no plans to use the LLMs until they opened it up on my tier. At this point however, it’s half the value I get out of Kagi.
M0r13n · 56m ago
I am a proud user of their assistent. It provides access to all models that I am interested in (basically only Sonnet/Opus) with stronger privacy guarantees than many of their competitors. Their UI/UX has definitely room for improvement. However, I find it pretty useful.
anon7000 · 1h ago
It’s fair to be concerned, but web search is probably the most likely field to be completely disrupted by AI. I mean if I’m asking a question, and would find an answer in the first page of search results, it’s pretty likely AI surface the same information more quickly than me sifting through pages of search results.
So I think it’s fair for them to at least have people thinking about that. Plus, the features they have aren’t intrusive and are completely optional. Like, it’d be dumb for a company to not spend development time on a threat that has a decent potential to shrink their (already captured) market.
hobofan · 2h ago
I am one of those worried people (and have voiced that opinion here on HN before).
However they have been on that course for a good part of the last year though, and they ultimately deliver a good product, which is what matters at the end of the day. Kagi mostly feels "feature-complete", and I'd rather have them spend time on the AI projects than trying to be too inventive and overloading the core product, which is the route many other startups take when they get to that point.
AlotOfReading · 1h ago
I don't think that the core product is nearly complete, even though I'm happy to keep paying for it. I still find myself falling back to Google for things like weather, flight info, or restaurants. I also put a family member on it that has to search for home products regularly as part of their contractor job. Google's decline was making that impossible. They wanted kagi to surface interesting results beyond SEO'd junk sites, which it mostly failed to do (though still better than Google).
fl0id · 3h ago
Yeah same. Super worried
theanonymousone · 3h ago
Convincing any one of those 50k people to ditch a free product for a paid one is a miracle by itself. Congrats to Kagi!
However, is there really no other model than these two, i.e. being 100% the product vs. paying the "full price" of the search?
Ma8ee · 3h ago
I didn’t ditch a “free” product. I ditched a product that I paid with my attention and time, which is something of the most valuable I have.
throwaway81523 · 3h ago
I've been using paid email (fastmail) for quite a long time and it's fine, I use it dozens or hundreds of times a day and it's around $4 a month. Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week (based on trying their free 100 queries) if subscribed. Otherwise Duckduckgo suffices. I'm satisfied with duckduckgo in a way that I could never be with any "free" email service since DDG doesn't require a signup and doesn't supply long term storage.
PartiallyTyped · 10m ago
Kagi gave me 300 free searches, then I got hooked.
burnished · 3h ago
I suspect the 'slippery slope' applies here
roughly · 2h ago
Advertising is a fungus. You let it into any part of your product and it’ll be everywhere before you know it.
UberFly · 3h ago
Sure. Kagi could just start showing ads to subscribers who only want to pay half price. That awesome Netflix model.
jaggederest · 3h ago
AKA "The worst of both worlds"
No comments yet
imafish · 2h ago
TV channels were doing this for decades before Netflix did.
lurk2 · 3h ago
I never understood why cryptomining never took off. The biggest issue I have with paying for anything on the internet is that I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go. If a service mines on a user’s machine, they just pay for it indirectly via their electric bill.
I guess the problem probably has to do with the value of the GPU cycles being lower than the served content. This is most apparent in the case of AI; e.g. if the mining lasts as long as the session, and the server runs 2 GPUs while the user is only running 1, then you can’t complete the “payment” unless the mining continues beyond the length of the session.
Tepix · 3h ago
Look at the actual numbers. There‘s a large percentage of mobile users. Then there are users on laptops with iGPUs.
To crypto mine even 1 cent would take forever.
theanonymousone · 1h ago
Now that the AI overlords demand more and more training data, maybe we will start "paying" by annotating some unit of information, aka Captcha-style.
kqr · 1h ago
Most users are on a batteried device. I'm not sure they're willing to pay in battery time and health.
Osiris · 4h ago
I've been a paying member for a while now. I'm happy to support a company that isn't Google or Microsoft for search.
hmottestad · 4h ago
760 600 queries per day. That’s about 8.8 queries per second.
Per user it’s about 15 queries per day. I’m sure there will be some that are incredibly active and some that aren’t active at all, but 15 per day seems quite reasonable.
dgellow · 4m ago
My personal stats for this year
Date (UTC) AI Tokens AI Cost (USD) Searches
Jun 2025 0 0.000 141
May 2025 0 0.000 743
Apr 2025 0 0.000 723
Mar 2025 0 0.000 621
Feb 2025 0 0.000 556
Jan 2025 10,692 0.000 1,189
Dec 2024 0 0.000 805
kqr · 1h ago
I think so too. Apparently I have an overall mean of 26 queries/day, with the lowest month the past year being 19 queries/day and the highest 35 queries/day. Most of this is during the weekday with software development work, but I also make web searches for all kinds of other things in my spare time.
I genuinely thought it would be higher, but I suppose bang patterns don't count.
(Posting this mostly so that people who are curious about subscribing to Kagi can get a sense of how many queries they're likely to need to use.)
rckclmbr · 3h ago
I have 515 since may 16 putting me as 22. So ya, math checks out. Love the service, been using them since March 2024
amelius · 46m ago
I wonder how much people's search behavior has changed since chatgpt.
sshine · 3h ago
I’ve been measuring my token count and I believe they are making a small amount on me even though I’m not holding back my AI usage. I do pick the cheaper and faster LLMs when I can, but mostly to avoid the waiting of heavy models with extended thinking.
SietrixDev · 2h ago
You're probably aware, but they recently added the actual cost of used tokens on the Billing page. This is much better than the token count on its own.
sshine · 1h ago
By "I've been measuring my token count", I do mean "I've been reading my billing page and comparing my token count month over month", but thanks for pointing that out so it's clear.
What the billing page doesn't go into detail about is number of searches caused by The Assistant, number of FastGPT searches, and number of regular searches. I'm curious because I'd like to track my tendencies; whether I am slowly using AI more than search, or if it stays the same. And FastGPT is a grayzone.
stavros · 2h ago
I feel like I'm the only person who doesn't really see the appeal. I have subscribed multiple times in the past, including a free trial for three months that recently ended. It wasn't bad, but when the trial ended I just switched back to DDG and kind of... didn't think about it again?
climb_stealth · 1h ago
For me part of it is supporting a project that is worth getting behind. I like that someone goes against the big ad-supported players in a field where it would seem impossible.
Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top.
I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
jessekv · 1h ago
I have DDG as the default search in Safari (because Kagi is not an option, maybe it requires profit sharing with Apple?) and I often end up using DDG out of convenience while being a Kagi subscriber.
I agree there is not a lot of differentiation between stock Kagi search and DDG. DDG still has a few ads but it's not that annoying, perfectly usable.
Kagi's assistants are pretty interesting though. Recently I asked it to find back a post that I vaguely remembered. It managed to generate a bunch of Kagi searches with different keywords and narrow it down to an old tweet.
jsnell · 50m ago
> maybe it requires profit sharing with Apple?
It does indeed, as was revealed during the Google Search antitrust case in the DDG testimony.
patchymcnoodles · 2h ago
Then maybe it is just not for you, completely fine :). I used DDG in the past, but didn't see a big improvement (it is better than Google though). Kagi really changed it for me and so I'm a paying user since a year or so.
jakubmazanec · 28m ago
I have similar experience. Tried Kagi two times, didn't see better results than Google once - the results are always bad in both search engines.
kid64 · 3h ago
But will Kagi survive the upcoming loss of the Bing Search API 2 months from now? I don't think I've heard the plan for that yet.
lazycouchpotato · 3h ago
Large customers like DuckDuckGo are unaffected by the API retirement [1]. I don't know if Kagi is one of them.
It seems that Kagi isn't expecting that things will change much [2].
I've been on the free tier for a short time and really liking it. I just can't justify paying at least $5 a month (I live in South Africa) for this, so not switching to paid yet. It's just a bit too much with our exchange rate.
wtmt · 1h ago
I’ve never even tried the free tier of Kagi because it’s limited and because the paid tiers are expensive (just like in your situation). I’m not looking for a free solution and I do pay for email (though not like tens of dollars a month, which is expensive).
Kagi’s official position is not to support regional pricing (visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread). The service is probably out of reach even for many people in the first world. Even its family tier is expensive.
Hopefully, when it reaches a much higher number of users, it’s able to reduce prices. Or it can just remain a niche service and potentially be disrupted by a competitor.
dkh · 2h ago
Just out of curiosity, what would you consider a reasonable price for such a service in your region?
wtmt · 1h ago
Not GP, and I’m in a totally different country than the GP, but I’d be willing to pay USD 2 a month for a duo plan. I’d be willing to pay on an annual basis too, since small monthly payments usually incur higher processing fees (percentage wise) for the seller. Just for comparison, this amount would be equivalent to a Spotify Premium Duo subscription (with its regional pricing).
tough · 3h ago
they should really move to geo-based pricing like some other SaaS do,
5usd in america aren't 5 usd in the rest of the world indeed
plutokras · 2h ago
They have fixed costs per query. Unlike VC-backed companies burning cash for market share, they need sustainable unit economics to stay profitable. This makes regional pricing hard to pull off.
I know I'm speaking form a position of privilege and this will be unpopular; but I'm not fond of subsidizing other users by paying premium prices for my subscriptions.
tough · 1h ago
I hadn't thought about that
TBH, if i where them i'd be trying to serve open source models from my own infra, much cheaper to pay per GPU's per hour and batch process all your users prompts, than leave that big 95% fat margins to OpenAI and Anthropic
But I guess they have customers who want those APIs anyways, idk, again, i thought they where a search service, not an ai company, so this sub for llms business deal is weird from that POV? like great that it works for them to get money/customers but that doesnt seem their main point of existing?
mkayokay · 2h ago
Also with regional pricing one must ensure the lock out all those people who want the service cheaper than in their country and try using VPNs or other means. Otherwise you loose even more money.
mongol · 1h ago
Does not neccessarily have to be done that way. It could also work like you pay for Kagi in country X, and get it localized for that country, using that language and prioritizing sites in that country and so on
wtmt · 1h ago
The official response is that they won’t because 95% of their costs are in the search itself. I’m unable to figure out how to link to the forum thread, but you can visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread.
Squarex · 2h ago
They probably have same costs for every user. They would be losing money if they charged significantly less for users in developing countries.
nottorp · 39m ago
Well then they'll be stuck with the Starbucks sipping crowd.
My lattes are far less expensive than that.
bicepjai · 3h ago
I tried Kagi a year ago and could not come to terms with nof searches as payment options .Constantly thinking about if I should search or not was a big reason. Now I use perplexity. Would love to try Kagi if payment plan changes
xigoi · 3h ago
You can get unlimited searches for $10/month.
jwr · 2h ago
I'm a happy Kagi user. I really enjoy using a search engine that is just that: a search engine. No ads, no sponsored results, no junk, no garbage. Just the results that I'm looking for.
I am tired of being advertising meat, and I'm willing to pay to use the services that do not waste my time.
torrance · 3h ago
If you select "All data" for their user count, you'll notice a sharp shift in the gradient of the user count about a year ago. Any idea what would cause this?
jdhendrickson · 3h ago
Googles seemingly inexorable slide into becoming unusable seems to have picked up speed around then.
cyberax · 1h ago
I think, they have started blending in some AI results into the main search feed. And not just for ads, it would be understandable. My personal example, I was trying to find consultants that could help with passing the Apple Store review.
For me, it's that combined with the prominent placement of the output of answer confabulators alongside search results. Given how terrible the output was initially, and how it is still not-infrequently awful, it reminds me of when Google was in "We've desperately gotta pump up the user numbers for Google Plus or else we'll lose the Race For Social!" mode and adding it to every big thing they controlled.
I'm still mad that they took away the '+' operator for that turd of a project. [0]
[0] To be clear, it totally could have been a great project. Early on, there were signs that it was going to be -at worst- decent. But, well, Vivek Gundotra wanted the project to be a big turd, so it ended up being a big turd.
smodo · 2h ago
The recent blog post discusses moving into the email space and suggests some interesting uses of LLM’s for handling mail (sorting and labeling rather than writing). I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with the Kagi products so far and would probably consider their e-mailservice if it’s as good. However the hassle of switching email providers is of course around 100x the hassle of switching search…
skarat · 2h ago
Good for them. Used it for a month or so a while back and liked it, just didn't renew my sub.
I really like their browser, Orion though. It's still rough, and crashes at times but it feels like a great non-chromium option for MacOS.
SietrixDev · 2h ago
They also announced a Linux version in early 2026.
zxexz · 3h ago
I love to use the service, though often forget to. I’ve been a paying member since they offered a plan. I think I’ve only made a few hundred searches. Almost all of those have been during deep dives when I finally get fed up enough to remember Kagi.
phildenhoff · 3h ago
Why not set it up as your default search engine? That’s what I did. Hard to forget when it’s the default
KingOfCoders · 1h ago
Y-axis starts at "48,961" -> marketing (of course). Not taking you seriously.
akarlsten · 45m ago
Presumably that's how many users they had 2 weeks ago, as indicated by the giant "Recent" indicator and the dates? You can always switch to "All Data".
SamFromSpace · 1h ago
The button right underneath toggles between “Recent” and “All Data”.
malnourish · 3h ago
Extremely happy ultimate tier subscriber. I like Orion, but I hope they focus mostly on Kagi.
ed_mercer · 1h ago
Only 50k? They need to step up their game and scale more aggressively. I want them to kill Google. At this pace I’m afraid it will be a losing battle.
0xCE0 · 54m ago
Google search is already dead/zombie. Borderline useless cesspool.
Unearned5161 · 3h ago
interesting to observe in their queries graph that tuesdays and wednesdays are peak traffic days with a difference of 200k queries compared with sundays
treeshateorcs · 1h ago
i wonder what happened on may 29th when *teams* hit a plunge
nektro · 4h ago
congrats on the milestone!
zoul · 3h ago
I love it. It feels great to have a search engine built for users, not advertisers or investors. Trivial stuff like being able to remove some domains from search results. Or not having to wade through AI bullshit to get to the results. Or, you know, not having your search queries sold to whatever advertising partners that care about my privacy.
1270018080 · 3h ago
I like the concept of this product but the search results are pretty bad and I really like google maps and flights. It'll take a long time for to be competitive with those features, if ever.
patchymcnoodles · 2h ago
For me the search results are much better. Even more since sometimes Google is full of AI and ads. And what does Maps and Flight has to do with it? I use Kagi and still Google Maps and Flight.
robin_reala · 1h ago
The !gmaps and !gflights bangs are available.
neoromantique · 3h ago
Routine reminder that Kagi pays share of profit to Yandex(so, directly to Kremlin), and employs people who support Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ilvez · 2h ago
Half a year ago I had a slim hope that they want to at least offer some solution to people who care about not supporting invasion, but now every month my hope gets ever smaller..
neoromantique · 2h ago
I really liked their stated mission and product, but since it depends so much on trust, this ethical inconsistency really kills it entirely for me.
I have been active user for over a year prior to initial scandal, but I no longer can trust leaderships judgement, and least I can do is inform people in comments when Kagi inevitably is brought up on HN, that part of their money would go to Yandex.
drakonka · 1h ago
I cancelled my subscription a few months ago for this reason.
The world might be a bad place, but each of us can make individual decisions, without "whataboutism". I certainly try to do so.
neoromantique · 2h ago
My country has cut all fuel imports from Russia on May 22, 2022.
And it is weird to compare something you as an individual have very limited control over with directly spending your money with a company. I believe it is important to inform people that part of their spending is going into Russia directly.
People truly don't gaf about anything as long as they're getting something for free. Sad.
I assume this is paying users, if this is total MAU ... damn.
PS. I do not mean Kagi is a bad product. I think they're great, actually. I'm just complaining about how poor the reception has been.
hotmeals · 3h ago
"Only" 50K paying customers, in a market where all the oligopolistic incumbents have been offering the product for free for more than 20 years. Of course that's sad for the average SV-type that is thinking about hypergrowth (a.k.a buying users with the equivalent of CC debt).
sshine · 4h ago
This is paying users.
And what matters to me is: that it’s enough to keep going, securing the service, and that the number is steadily increasing.
dymk · 4h ago
Will it ever be sustainable? It’s not enough that the number goes up, it has to go up fast enough to pay the cost of doing business.
sshine · 4h ago
Yes, they were profitable before they reached 40k paying users. And as another commenter said: I don’t care how big they are, as long as they’re sustainable, they’re extremely useful to me.
moralestapia · 4h ago
>that it’s enough to keep going
How do you know?
My napkin math says they're in red numbers, but let's see yours! :)
They reached profitability one year ago, two years into their existence. It’s a cool company.
Edit: Corrected from two years to one year
moralestapia · 4h ago
Huh?
~Buddy, we are still in 2025 ...~ (removed, parent comment corrected)
If they were profitable then why did they raise money again?
>inb4, to expand their business
If that's the reason, where is this expansion? Their growth curve looks exactly the same since they started ...
IMO they invested a lot of money into their AI efforts, so maybe they raised for R&D?
I want them to do well, it's just that I thought they already had a much larger market share.
sshine · 3h ago
> where is this expansion?
They hired a technical architect and an email engineer, so the biggest expansion is clearly into email hosting. But I imagine that AI R&D continues. I hope they consider more agentic extensions than search.
UberFly · 3h ago
Lets see your napkin math.
Aurornis · 4h ago
> People truly don't gaf about anything as long as they're getting something for free. Sad.
I think Kagi is great. I also understand why most people don’t need Kagi. It’s not hard to see why most people aren’t interested in yet another monthly payment on top of all the other things we’re asked to pay for right now.
sshine · 3h ago
It’s deductible if you run a small company.
drawfloat · 3h ago
But it’s still an additional expense that many do not need.
sshine · 1h ago
Nobody needs an additional expense.
Well, unless you're working for government and next year's budget depends on this year's expenses.
Most modern people need search engines. And most people don't care about advertising and having their private data sold. And most of those who do are happy to use adblockers and/or free alternatives to Google that still show ads, but may or may not collect as much data about you.
So it is indeed a niche: People who want to pay for search and AI, when both of those are "free".
As for having an AI broker instead of getting it straight from the model companies: I think the economic incentives are better. I don't want bloated answers, just because the model companies make money per token. I want to either pay for each token, or pay a lump sum to somebody who optimizes the result for me and pockets the difference.
jan_g · 4h ago
If they didn't take investments (and therefore not beholden to all that unicorn expectations), then it's totally fine. They've reached profitability sometime last yer, if I remember correctly. It was discussed also here on hacker news.
sshine · 3h ago
They took 92 presumably smaller investors, so no VC.
eviks · 3h ago
Strange take, this is a premium product, of course it's not going to sell itself into world domination even if people care
baobabKoodaa · 4h ago
50k paying users is not nothing. And the trendline points in the right direction. Also, the products are good.
moralestapia · 4h ago
Can you cite the part of my comment where I wrote "50k users is nothing"?
sshine · 4h ago
> Ooof ... I thought they were doing way better.
No comments yet
TylerE · 4h ago
Alternatively: People really really hate micropayments and metered billing.
dymk · 4h ago
They offer unlimited searches for $10/month, you don’t need to do metered billing
sshine · 3h ago
Kinda. Their Search API is not freely available, and I believe their current cost structure is preventing its popularisation.
Which means I can’t embed Kagi Search or Assistant into my open source products because APIs are second-class citizens.
To be fair, it seems like this makes sense for them economically, and maybe it even makes sense for growing in the right direction.
But as someone who would rather use their API, it’s a pity Search and Assistant aren’t there.
112233 · 3h ago
I am sample size 1 of people! I love metered billing! I would gladly use metered plan with top-up credit if kagi had one.
Once I tried openrouter, I am not touching any subscription LLM providers.
Google/Microsoft/Apple "all-in-one" personal subscriptions are a different beast, because they charge well below cost.
bruce511 · 4h ago
This is not exactly a surprise. Paying to remove ads is a tiny market.
As much as we like to complain about ads, we also aren't really prepared to fund things that aren't ad driven.
Frankly on the web, for me, ads are fine. For TV less so. I pay for streaming (no ads) and for sport (no ad interruptions) etc.
For search, half the time I'm clicking on the ad anyway.
xvilka · 3h ago
Ads are fine when you have ad-block installed. If not, they are absolute nuisance.
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands.
But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
Then you have to pick a finger in the air multiplier for the value of the business. A stockmarket listed SaaS company that isn't over-inflated might be 10x the revenue, so that would be $50 million valuation.
Kagi is small, but it must still have good margins. So maybe really it is 5x revenue in value, depends on lots of things! Who selling to, and predictions for long term growth.
[1]: https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-t...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
It also uses other indices along Google.
> All results from external indexes.
The above is something I see all the time when using Kagi.
On the index side I agree, I think they are using other people indexes so far, I don't know if they are thinking about building one themselves.
Same for LLM, but I think that there the problem is even worse.
Obviously they don't have the ancillary services (Maps etc), but for just searching, Kagi is far more likely to surface useful results instead of just the highest bidder. Compare a search like "us esta" for a clear demonstration.
First search result for "us esta" in Google is "https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta", same as in kagi, is that your objectivite fail at coming up with a simple metric?
I also have my own WTFs with Google, I even started collecting them: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59
I'm not entirely sure what "objectively superior" is even supposed to mean in the context of a search engine, or how this follows from having 50k users, but that ceases to be an even remotely plausible statement if you've ever attempted to get good non-English search results.
Let others handle rarer queries.
If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
Also am worried about the move to mail, I already have fastmail, and kagi would need to create a heck of a mail client for me to even consider switching. I'd much rather have a company that does search very well, a company that does mail very well, and a good communication between the two.
And I also have less tangible worries about Vlad's demeanor when I see some of his writing in the feedback forum or discord. It comes across as ambitious but not very circumspect, but maybe that's what's necessary to make it in this sector. I won't pretend to have enough experience to offer much opinion on the matter, all I can say is that its unsettling at times.
Sometimes I search for things I know I am looking for. Other times I don’t know quite what I’m looking for or I know in advance that I’m not likely to find it—so I chuck it at Llama 4 Maverick and it usually gives me something useful.
I had no plans to use the LLMs until they opened it up on my tier. At this point however, it’s half the value I get out of Kagi.
So I think it’s fair for them to at least have people thinking about that. Plus, the features they have aren’t intrusive and are completely optional. Like, it’d be dumb for a company to not spend development time on a threat that has a decent potential to shrink their (already captured) market.
However they have been on that course for a good part of the last year though, and they ultimately deliver a good product, which is what matters at the end of the day. Kagi mostly feels "feature-complete", and I'd rather have them spend time on the AI projects than trying to be too inventive and overloading the core product, which is the route many other startups take when they get to that point.
However, is there really no other model than these two, i.e. being 100% the product vs. paying the "full price" of the search?
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I guess the problem probably has to do with the value of the GPU cycles being lower than the served content. This is most apparent in the case of AI; e.g. if the mining lasts as long as the session, and the server runs 2 GPUs while the user is only running 1, then you can’t complete the “payment” unless the mining continues beyond the length of the session.
Per user it’s about 15 queries per day. I’m sure there will be some that are incredibly active and some that aren’t active at all, but 15 per day seems quite reasonable.
I genuinely thought it would be higher, but I suppose bang patterns don't count.
(Posting this mostly so that people who are curious about subscribing to Kagi can get a sense of how many queries they're likely to need to use.)
What the billing page doesn't go into detail about is number of searches caused by The Assistant, number of FastGPT searches, and number of regular searches. I'm curious because I'd like to track my tendencies; whether I am slowly using AI more than search, or if it stays the same. And FastGPT is a grayzone.
Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top.
I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
I agree there is not a lot of differentiation between stock Kagi search and DDG. DDG still has a few ads but it's not that annoying, perfectly usable.
Kagi's assistants are pretty interesting though. Recently I asked it to find back a post that I vaguely remembered. It managed to generate a bunch of Kagi searches with different keywords and narrow it down to an old tweet.
It does indeed, as was revealed during the Google Search antitrust case in the DDG testimony.
It seems that Kagi isn't expecting that things will change much [2].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/bing-microsoft-api-support-endin...
[2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/7107-microsoft-bing-retiring-sear...
Kagi’s official position is not to support regional pricing (visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread). The service is probably out of reach even for many people in the first world. Even its family tier is expensive.
Hopefully, when it reaches a much higher number of users, it’s able to reduce prices. Or it can just remain a niche service and potentially be disrupted by a competitor.
5usd in america aren't 5 usd in the rest of the world indeed
I know I'm speaking form a position of privilege and this will be unpopular; but I'm not fond of subsidizing other users by paying premium prices for my subscriptions.
TBH, if i where them i'd be trying to serve open source models from my own infra, much cheaper to pay per GPU's per hour and batch process all your users prompts, than leave that big 95% fat margins to OpenAI and Anthropic
But I guess they have customers who want those APIs anyways, idk, again, i thought they where a search service, not an ai company, so this sub for llms business deal is weird from that POV? like great that it works for them to get money/customers but that doesnt seem their main point of existing?
My lattes are far less expensive than that.
I am tired of being advertising meat, and I'm willing to pay to use the services that do not waste my time.
Somehow, Google decided to show me the ferry timetable: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59
Like, whut?
I'm still mad that they took away the '+' operator for that turd of a project. [0]
[0] To be clear, it totally could have been a great project. Early on, there were signs that it was going to be -at worst- decent. But, well, Vivek Gundotra wanted the project to be a big turd, so it ended up being a big turd.
I really like their browser, Orion though. It's still rough, and crashes at times but it feels like a great non-chromium option for MacOS.
I have been active user for over a year prior to initial scandal, but I no longer can trust leaderships judgement, and least I can do is inform people in comments when Kagi inevitably is brought up on HN, that part of their money would go to Yandex.
And it is weird to compare something you as an individual have very limited control over with directly spending your money with a company. I believe it is important to inform people that part of their spending is going into Russia directly.
My question is serious. If this is indeed true, I will be canceling my subscription immediately.
People truly don't gaf about anything as long as they're getting something for free. Sad.
I assume this is paying users, if this is total MAU ... damn.
PS. I do not mean Kagi is a bad product. I think they're great, actually. I'm just complaining about how poor the reception has been.
And what matters to me is: that it’s enough to keep going, securing the service, and that the number is steadily increasing.
How do you know?
My napkin math says they're in red numbers, but let's see yours! :)
Profitable as of a year ago
They reached profitability one year ago, two years into their existence. It’s a cool company.
Edit: Corrected from two years to one year
~Buddy, we are still in 2025 ...~ (removed, parent comment corrected)
If they were profitable then why did they raise money again?
>inb4, to expand their business
If that's the reason, where is this expansion? Their growth curve looks exactly the same since they started ...
IMO they invested a lot of money into their AI efforts, so maybe they raised for R&D?
I want them to do well, it's just that I thought they already had a much larger market share.
They hired a technical architect and an email engineer, so the biggest expansion is clearly into email hosting. But I imagine that AI R&D continues. I hope they consider more agentic extensions than search.
I think Kagi is great. I also understand why most people don’t need Kagi. It’s not hard to see why most people aren’t interested in yet another monthly payment on top of all the other things we’re asked to pay for right now.
Well, unless you're working for government and next year's budget depends on this year's expenses.
Most modern people need search engines. And most people don't care about advertising and having their private data sold. And most of those who do are happy to use adblockers and/or free alternatives to Google that still show ads, but may or may not collect as much data about you.
So it is indeed a niche: People who want to pay for search and AI, when both of those are "free".
As for having an AI broker instead of getting it straight from the model companies: I think the economic incentives are better. I don't want bloated answers, just because the model companies make money per token. I want to either pay for each token, or pay a lump sum to somebody who optimizes the result for me and pockets the difference.
No comments yet
Which means I can’t embed Kagi Search or Assistant into my open source products because APIs are second-class citizens.
To be fair, it seems like this makes sense for them economically, and maybe it even makes sense for growing in the right direction.
But as someone who would rather use their API, it’s a pity Search and Assistant aren’t there.
Once I tried openrouter, I am not touching any subscription LLM providers.
Google/Microsoft/Apple "all-in-one" personal subscriptions are a different beast, because they charge well below cost.
As much as we like to complain about ads, we also aren't really prepared to fund things that aren't ad driven.
Frankly on the web, for me, ads are fine. For TV less so. I pay for streaming (no ads) and for sport (no ad interruptions) etc.
For search, half the time I'm clicking on the ad anyway.