Why Android can't use CDC Ethernet (2023) (jordemort.dev)
242 points by goodburb 12h ago 99 comments
Forests offset warming more than thought: study (news.ucr.edu)
111 points by m463 4h ago 27 comments
Kagi Reaches 50k Users
292 tigroferoce 146 6/9/2025, 4:38:32 AM kagi.com ↗
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Let others handle rarer queries.
[1]: https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-t...
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.
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?
No comments yet
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.
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...
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.
I am tired of being advertising meat, and I'm willing to pay to use the services that do not waste my time.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.