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.
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
jonplackett · 31d ago
Just been reading about them - they haven’t taken venture funding - so I expect they don’t have the same pressure to 10X every 6 months.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
spacechild1 · 31d ago
This sounds great! I'm sceptical of every company that takes VC money, so it's great to see that they didn't.
carlosjobim · 31d ago
Well they did, they took venture funding from their users.
What "most people" (Arch Linux enthusiasts I presume) think about it has no influence on the contracts between Kagi and their investors, and the laws the parties have to abide to.
spacechild1 · 30d ago
When I used the term "VC money" I obviously meant VC firms. It's not about the laws, it's about the underlying motivations.
carlosjobim · 30d ago
And how do you suppose that Kagi receives the money invested by their users? If you guessed by function of a VC firm, then you guessed right.
These are legal and contractual proceedings, with strict definitions of terms by law, not by popular opinion in the hacker community.
"Underlying motivations" of the investors is never a legal factor in any kind of investment deal. That's not something that can be accounted for by any kind of contract.
spacechild1 · 29d ago
> If you guessed by function of a VC firm, then you guessed right.
I would not have guessed that. Why would I need a VC firm to invest a few thousand dollars into a company?
carlosjobim · 29d ago
Because Kagi is not a publicly traded company, where anybody can invest.
They raised money in the form of SAFE notes, in which case a venture capital firm is created (you can also call it a legal entity or a juridical person) and each investor owns a part of that firm in proportion to the money they invest. That firm in turn will have a contract with the startup company which details and regulates how the invested funds in the future can be transformed to actual shares.
spacechild1 · 29d ago
Thanks for the insight. But that's not how most people understand the term "VC money". So while you might be technically right, you are still (intentionally?) missing the point.
spacechild1 · 29d ago
We're talking about behavior, not legal factors. Just because something is legally equivalent does not mean it is the same in all other aspects.
jonplackett · 30d ago
That’s not venture funding.
Key difference: They didn’t take any funding from anyone whose values are misaligned with their own
carlosjobim · 30d ago
Venture funding is a financial and legal term with a defined meaning. Unfortunately the real world does not care whatever idea the hacker "community" has regarding what the words mean.
CL_ergo · 30d ago
Actually the real world does care. Words have meanings in the context that they're spoken, and often times whether you want to or not, dictionaries have to update their meanings because they changed over time.
carlosjobim · 30d ago
A dictionary has no bearing on the law and what is defined in a business contract. That would be like me claiming that I own a share of Apple Inc because I purchased an Apple in the supermarket. Sure, maybe I can get the entire HN comment section to agree with me, but that doesn't change reality.
No comments yet
aembleton · 31d ago
Why would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns.
If you can bootstrap it yourself then there's no need to do this, but those that bring in investors will need an exit.
layer8 · 31d ago
The conclusion still stands: “It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.”
andrew_lettuce · 31d ago
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but the last line feels off. Investment profile needs to be matched with returns, but they don't all need to be 5 year mega exits, and they don't need the same companies to be racheted up in round after round of fund-led growth. This is why we don't build companies that will last 100+ years anymore
bombcar · 31d ago
Investors in “lifestyle businesses” and bootstrapped ones exist.
You just never hear about them because they’re small and like the businesses they invest in, they’re satisfied with moderate returns.
beezle · 31d ago
Because if they do not care about the product or users their returns will be sub-optimal?
spacechild1 · 31d ago
Some (non-VC) investors are personally invested in the product and want it to succeed/improve.
reaperducer · 31d ago
Why would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns.
You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines.
The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
No comments yet
jonplackett · 31d ago
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.
ajsnigrutin · 31d ago
The problem here is Zawinski's law:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
datadrivenangel · 31d ago
Also competitive pressures mean that good apps often get crowded out by bloatware and so have to become bloatware to compete...
mdaniel · 31d ago
or the modern version: s/bloatware/AI/
he said, typing from Firefox with its new "open AI chatbot" sidebar button
mostlysimilar · 31d ago
set browser.ml.chat.enabled to false in about:config
mdaniel · 31d ago
I don't know why they defaulted to placing it right next to my back button, but you inspired me to check and yes, one can right-click and either remove that dumb Sidebars button or hide it in the overflow menu
carlosjobim · 30d ago
If you have the skills and the drive to successfully launch a good startup, then probably you won't be satisfied with keeping it a small time affair. Either you try to expand or you sell it and go make a new startup.
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
PartiallyTyped · 31d ago
That's a very common approach to building tech companies, 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.
jonplackett · 31d ago
I was trying to use Twilio the other day and just gave up because it’s so awful now.
It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.
sshine · 31d ago
I think Jira used to be okay, too.
Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
christophilus · 31d ago
It always sucked. Or, at least , it did 15 years or so ago when I first (and last) used it.
bombcar · 31d ago
Jira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought.
If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good.
But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
ryandrake · 31d ago
Yea, it's so customizable, that every complaint about "Jira" is usually actually a complaint about how the person's organization has deliberately set up Jira. Jira workflows can be configured to be amazing, or they can be configured to be the ninth circle of hell.
sshine · 31d ago
The last time I used Jira, the CTO who decided he should be the project manager had made a ticket category named "Category".
He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid.
He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right").
I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults.
Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
gannonburgett · 31d ago
Enshittification is the word we're looking for here.
Facebook and Twitter are social media, so having a massive userbase is do-or-die for them. I don't think the same applies to most businesses.
jonplackett · 31d ago
Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back…
Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it.
From their website:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
aestetix · 31d ago
I would prefer that they either stay small, or if they try to grow, do so without sacrificing their customer support system.
American companies, startups in particular, have terrible support. It's really nice to have actual contact with someone when an issue arises.
jaggederest · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Would you mind explaining how you came to that number? I'm intrigued. Genuinely.
jaggederest · 31d ago
I assume that their weighted revenue per user is around $10 a month, with a discount for annual subscriptions, and they have 50k users.
Edit: And the insane values these days are P/E of 90+, bad businesses are less than 5, so I took a conservative estimate of 10 P/E, but I think a more reasonable number might actually be 40, putting them in the centimillion category for sure.
frabcus · 31d 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.
No comments yet
zombiwoof · 31d ago
could be that they pay minimum wage
ls-a · 31d 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.
obtusifolia · 31d 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.
> Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot. We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation
christophilus · 31d ago
It doesn’t sound good, but maybe they mean it in a more benign way, like, “We don’t have the funds to hire people who expect to twiddle their thumbs and get paid for it the way their over-funded VC peers do.”
In other words, maybe they’re saying they don’t have any BS jobs like Meta and Google seem to have.
bombcar · 31d ago
A small team can’t waste time on interviews of people who won’t take the pay.
Google’s HR review team that reviews the team that reviews interview processes is probably larger than Kagi.
zombiwoof · 31d ago
the wierd part to to me is they expect you to spend 2 weeks on a take home coding assignment, then maybe if you pass, tell you the max they pay is 100k a year.
deng · 31d ago
"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.
dewey · 31d ago
This could mean many different things. Like communicating well, documenting things to what you are probably assuming: answering your messages 24 hours a day instantly.
I doubt you can get a feeling for the work / life balance from this half sentence.
No comments yet
zombiwoof · 31d ago
they literally pay less than you could make working at Home Depot
GlacierFox · 31d ago
Oh, so like, any small, growing company then...
eviks · 31d 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.
m-schuetz · 31d ago
Except Kagi often delivers better results than the modern, Ad, SEO and AI generated stuff that google delivers nowadays. And the most important selling point: You can block certain domains which vastly improves the results.
patchymcnoodles · 31d 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.
bigfatkitten · 31d ago
Google has a powerful commercial incentive to deliver mediocre search performance.
If search works well, the result you wanted is in the first spot on page #1. This is a bad outcome for Google.
The more follow up searches you run and the more trash you wade through, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes.
maelito · 31d ago
But it's not their index. Without Google or bing, they fall.
I love how transparent they are about everything, and even that they show stats on "most blocked domain".
Unsurprisingly it's Pintrest that annoys people the most.
miki123211 · 31d ago
> unsurprisingly
I haven't used Kagi much, but I don't think I've ever seen a single Pinterest result from any other search engine, I barely even know what the thing is for.
Is this a US thing? A Kagi quirk specifically?
flexagoon · 31d ago
Maybe you just don't really search for images? Pinterest constantly comes up in image search results and then doesn't actually let you view or download the full image until you sign up.
happymellon · 30d ago
It also removes sources, so that awesome looking bag only comes up as Pintrest pins and not anywhere that actually sells it.
happymellon · 30d ago
I am not US based.
And to be honest, I don't see as much Pintrest crap as I used to. It may just be that it has fallen out of favour because of its terrible design. But it was a site that basically let you create mood boards from images that you found as your browsed.
The big problem with it was that it simply copied the image so if you were looking for anything, Pintrest came up with the images for a product but then had removed all the source so it just flooded search results with uncited references and you couldn't find anything useful.
Reverse image searching to find sites thst sold a prpduct became useless.
0xffff2 · 31d ago
Possibly a US thing, definitely not a Kagi thing. Useless Pintrest results (especially in image search) that don't actually the thing they pretend to are ubiquitous on Google.
M0r13n · 31d ago
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.
OJFord · 31d ago
I've never seen that, do I need to turn on a setting to show the indices used or something?
M0r13n · 31d ago
It is shown under the search box right before the first result
OJFord · 31d ago
Ah so it is (on desktop site), thanks. 'test' -> '58% unique Kagi results'; 'test2' -> 'all results from external indexes'.
ulrikrasmussen · 31d ago
Why? I think that's an extraordinary claim.
eviks · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
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.
Barrin92 · 31d ago
>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.
carlosjobim · 30d ago
Kagi gives great search results in other languages than English. You might have to select the right region first. Kagi and Google are the only search engines I have tried that gives decent results for other languages than English.
eviks · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Are you using an ad blocker or something? For me it's the 11th (!) link on mobile, far below the fold.
lolc · 31d ago
Can confirm, official page is first result in Kagi and below the fold in Google for me.
robertlagrant · 31d ago
For me on desktop it was 3 giant ads but then the first real link was that one.
lostlogin · 31d ago
Any adverts and the competition is over as far as I’m concerned. I happily pay not to see them.
rafram · 31d ago
uBlock Origin is free.
lolc · 31d ago
Sure an ad blocker improves the experience somewhat. But I try to keep adversarial relationships out of my life. I don't understand why people want to normalize this.
mdaniel · 31d ago
Only in Firefox or user-friendly browsers, otherwise uBlock Lite is free for Manifest v3 browsers
rafram · 31d ago
Both block all Google search ads fully and seamlessly.
0_gravitas · 31d ago
but they don't block sponsored/seo-gamed articles, no?
rafram · 31d ago
Neither does Kagi, at least fully. Customizations help a bit until you need to search for something outside your usual focus areas. Anyone who claims to have created a search engine that truly surfaces the best links and ignores SEO is lying to you.
0_gravitas · 30d ago
That covers half of it, and indeed I do also rely on community and personal block/deranking lists for SEO spam.
Does ublock or ddg etc block sponsored results?
jorvi · 30d ago
iOS Firefox doesn't support extensions nor does it have proper adblocking.
lolc · 31d ago
I don't want to scroll around and decide what is real on every search.
robertlagrant · 31d ago
Thanks - I'll try and remember that!
cyberax · 31d 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.
First one on Kagi is the official US government ESTA website.
HumanOstrich · 31d ago
What is "objectivite"?
bombcar · 31d ago
The mineral form of objective; mainly mined in the Rockies but the EU and Australia have large untapped deposits of it.
HumanOstrich · 31d ago
Oh I see, thank you. Does it react to subjectivite?
cyberax · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
marcus_holmes · 31d ago
Same. Happy Kagi user, and very happy to pay for search now I've tried it.
Hopefully, now that they've proven that you can create a profitable company from doing this, more will follow and we'll get a proper ecosystem.
Like others, I'd prefer to see Kagi succeed at being the best possible search engine and nothing else, than try and do the Google thing and do everything.
erlend_sh · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
tkel · 31d ago
Maybe what you really want is a consumer cooperative. A business collectively owned by it's users.
redserk · 31d ago
A cooperative will not solve the problem of a company eventually making a decision that some group of users will not like.
There exists exactly 0 business structures that can solve the problem of 100.00% of a userbase being completely satisfied with all decision-making.
beAbU · 31d ago
You are describing normal public shareholding.
Soon those users will stop caring about the product that they use, but rather about the value of the underlying share/s.
SllX · 31d ago
No. I don’t care what their corporate structure is. I just don’t get attached.
dkh · 31d ago
Are you just worried about his/their divided attention or are there specific projects that concern you?
Unearned5161 · 31d 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.
ysavir · 31d ago
> 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.
Out of curiosity, what communication do you want to see between your mail service and search service? Half of what I'd like to get out of paying is keeping them separate!
Unearned5161 · 31d ago
Honestly I said that as a shoe in for a representation of my larger view of corporate idealist philosophy. Now that I think of it I don't really have an interest in that particular communication bridge, although I recognize that some people might like having an "omni" search tool that brings results from everywhere.
I'll rephrase to state that I'd much rather have a unix-like philosophy where you have small-ish companies each specializing and being very good at one thing and then you have an active medium they all live in and talk together and hold hands and...
bpbp-mango · 31d ago
Oh yeah, maps is really poor. I have to use google still.
maelito · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
threetonesun · 31d ago
Even if search gets me the right results at the top of the stack, I have to click into them. Something that can (correctly) summarize all of the results with references is absolutely an improvement.
hobofan · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Yeah same. Super worried
theanonymousone · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
marcus_holmes · 31d ago
I was the same, but I didn't want to go back to DDG after the trial ended. It was that simple.
flexagoon · 31d ago
> Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week
Do people really use web search that little? According to the stats Kagi shows me, I make about 50-100 web searches every day on average.
bdangubic · 31d ago
wouldn’t this depend on the day? some days I hit 300+ but I’ve also had (many) days without a single search…
throwaway81523 · 30d ago
I use web search quite a lot, but most of the time DDG works fine for me. A handful of times per week, I'm unsatisfied with the DDG results for some particular query where I think Kagi might be better. So I'd check Kagi on those occasions if I had access. But meh, I don't need it that much.
devilkin · 31d ago
We (partner and I) average between 700 and 900 searches a month.
Kagi has been so worth it.
UberFly · 31d ago
Sure. Kagi could just start showing ads to subscribers who only want to pay half price. That awesome Netflix model.
jaggederest · 31d ago
AKA "The worst of both worlds"
No comments yet
imafish · 31d ago
TV channels were doing this for decades before Netflix did.
AdamN · 31d ago
And newspapers and magazines. You pay for the magazine and you also get the ads inside.
burnished · 31d ago
I suspect the 'slippery slope' applies here
roughly · 31d ago
Advertising is a fungus. You let it into any part of your product and it’ll be everywhere before you know it.
lurk2 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
hedora · 31d ago
You’re describing google.
Though training data sets based on private information about people are worth more to them, so they focus on that.
That lets them do things like run crooked ad auctions that screw websites and advertisers, intentionally worsen search results exactly enough to maximize profits, and other stuff that came out during their trial.
theanonymousone · 31d ago
I understand your point. But in my hypothetical model, the paying entity (the customer) does not have an incentive in manipulating the search results, and the search is still optimised (only) for relevance to the user query.
kqr · 31d ago
Most users are on a batteried device. I'm not sure they're willing to pay in battery time and health.
carlosjobim · 31d ago
>...I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go
That problem has been solved for anybody who wants it solved, through Apple Pay and Google Pay, or even the built-in feature in the browser for remembering credit cards.
Normal people absolutely would not accept websites hi-jacking their computer to mine crypto and hardware manufacturers like Apple would swiftly implement measures to protect users from those freaks.
Biganon · 28d ago
How do you prove you've effectively tried mining, like the server asked you to?
PartiallyTyped · 31d ago
Kagi gave me 300 free searches, then I got hooked.
mediumsmart · 30d ago
Convincing? I was like Finally, a search engine! when Kagi appeared.
And no, there is only those 2 solutions.
stavros · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
protimewaster · 31d ago
One of my issues is that I just don't want to have to log into search. I use a bunch of different devices each day, some of which I control and some of which I don't, throughout the course of my work day. I don't want to have to log into Kagi on each one. It's much easier to just use a search that doesn't require a login.
Plus, it seems like having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person. It's probably easier for them to associate my activity with me when I log in than it is for DDG or Google to track my activity when I'm not logged in and can't be easily distinguished from the dozen other people that used that computer that day.
pbronez · 31d ago
> I don't want to have to log into Kagi on each one.
Yes, this is annoying. They make it as easy as they can (QR code login, session links) but it's still a speedbump.
> having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person.
That's a legitimate concern. Kagi added Privacy Pass support to mitigate it
Kagi privacy pass does not support disabling safe search, and is subsequently completely useless for a good chunk of the queries people don't want associated with their name and address.
jessekv · 31d 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.
einsteinx2 · 31d ago
For Safari you just install their extension and it redirects your default search engine to Kagi. Works fine for me on iOS and macOS. But yeah it’s super frustrating that Apple doesn’t let you set any arbitrary search engine.
jessekv · 31d ago
I had the extension for a while and it didn't work reliably for me.
I replaced it with a "let's fetch" shortcut.
jsnell · 31d ago
> maybe it requires profit sharing with Apple?
It does indeed, as was revealed during the Google Search antitrust case in the DDG testimony.
bosie · 31d ago
can't you use their extension in safari to set kagi as the default search engine?
jessekv · 31d ago
My experience of the extension was bad.
The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.
On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension.
On desktop Safari, you can additionally make Kagi your home page. Not as convenient as searching directly from the top bar but not bad either.
jessekv · 31d ago
My experience of the extension was bad.
The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.
On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens Kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension, it is fast snd reliable.
patchymcnoodles · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
lostlogin · 31d ago
Did you try the personalised results?
Wikipedia first. No Pinterest, no W3Schools, no Fox etc etc.
They have a nice list for suggestions.
wild_egg · 31d ago
Being able to block sites completely and uprank others I find valuable is the entire reason I pay for Kagi.
The results aren't necessarily better than other search engines in general but the personalization is so incredibly valuable.
Oh and having it auto rewrite Reddit results to Old Reddit helps a lot too.
ajdude · 30d ago
I really like kagi's regex redirects on search results; keeps old.reddit.com working on my iPhone. I also take advantage of their search filters and delisting bad urls that I don't like in search results.
DDG is mostly rebranded Bing. The problem is the quality of search results isn't very good compared to Google / Kagi. But it could depend on what you use it for.
Osiris · 31d 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.
tylervigen · 31d ago
I love and respect what Kagi is doing and I was a customer for years, but I recently canceled my subscription.
I found that have two main use cases:
1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.
2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.
I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.
Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.
abtinf · 31d ago
For your first case, why not use the “?” operator to trigger an LLM response, or use Kagi Assistant (which gives you access to pretty much all the different models you might want to use)?
tylervigen · 28d ago
Thanks. I did not know this, but it triggers a different problem. Many of my LLM queries are for work. My company has data protection agreements with OpenAI, but not with Kagi. These matter more for LLMs than raw search.
For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.
DirkH · 24d ago
For traveling I have found for cities where it is available CityMapper (started by ex-Google maps devs iirc) is superior to Google Maps in every way.
mbarria · 30d ago
1) Kagi has had AI features for quite a while. And you get access to quite a wide variety of LLMs for the price.
2) Yeah this is the one thing I still use google for. Though they did recently update Kagi maps (a weeka ago I think?).
zamalek · 31d ago
> less SEO spammed
I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).
hmottestad · 31d 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.
kqr · 31d 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.)
dgellow · 31d 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
rckclmbr · 31d 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 · 31d ago
I wonder how much people's search behavior has changed since chatgpt.
hedora · 31d ago
If you append ? to the end of a query, kagi runs the query through an llm that cites its sources. It very rarely hallucinates at this point, but I still click through to check.
I keep trying chatgpt style products, but rarely reach for them because I don’t really have a concrete use case for them. I use ? all the time, code completion at work and regularly generate images. Generic chat can do those things but is never as good as specialized tools I have access to.
My guess is that purpose-built specialized expert AIs are going to end up being more useful than the “everything” products like the chatgpt UI, but time will tell, I guess.
addandsubtract · 31d ago
Is the AI search part of the normal search plan or charged extra? Because atm, I'm still using Perplexity on a trial plan, but would like to try Kagi if it did the same, but used a better underlying search engine.
amelius · 31d ago
I mean, I used to search on Google for specific stackoverflow posts. I have never done that since I started using chatgpt etc.
I have no numbers but I bet my # of searches/day went down drastically because of that alone.
sshine · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
kid64 · 31d 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 · 31d 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].
Find Kagi's logo in the "Used by some of the biggest names in Tech..." gallery below the fold at https://brave.com/search/api/.
chilldsgn · 31d ago
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 · 31d 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.
presbyterian · 31d ago
I live in the US and the cost for unlimited search (which I would need because I do a lot of research) is too expensive for me as well. I was only able to get on by splitting it with a family plan.
dkh · 31d ago
Just out of curiosity, what would you consider a reasonable price for such a service in your region?
wtmt · 31d 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).
chilldsgn · 30d ago
I'd pay the price of a coffee, would gladly give up one cup a month for this. That's about the equivalent of $2.50
tough · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
rurp · 31d ago
That's largely under Kagi's control though. They don't seem to be working hard to reduce their expensive dependencies, instead choosing to focus on a number of other features/products. Maybe that's the better business strategy overall but it does limit their appeal to many potential customers.
tough · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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
Aachen · 31d ago
Not that this couldn't be changed to the detriment of the service, but just to note: it's currently a feature to localise your results to any region
As someone in the EU/Schengen, I need results for 3 languages or 4 regions (if "worldwide" counts as one region) on a weekly basis. If a Dutch payment method would mean getting only Dutch results, it would be about as valuable as a newspaper with all pages about trade and international affairs blacked out: you'd need to buy it for every region you're interested in which probably surpasses the original price
benhurmarcel · 31d ago
One of the reasons I pay for Kagi is being able to get localized results from different countries, not just my own.
chilldsgn · 29d ago
I agree with you. I understand it's incredibly challenging to implement regional pricing, especially if your company is based in a 1st world country, and dependencies are also priced for 1st world countries.
wtmt · 31d 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.
tough · 31d ago
they should really try to improve their margins on their main business imho, instead of doing side quests reselling openai credits?
Aachen · 31d ago
If that's true, they may be at a point where 20% cost reduction takes 80% more work (or at least more customers to get more volume discounts), whereas reselling someone else's product is a quick win
Squarex · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Well then they'll be stuck with the Starbucks sipping crowd.
My lattes are far less expensive than that.
Aachen · 31d ago
I also find it steep. I've got several reservations such as always needing to be logged in on all devices where you want to use it / it being gated in general (most software projects I support are available to everyone equally) and the search results not being better than anything else, but 5$/month would be okay to support this concept... but that hasn't got enough searches included. You also pay double for image searches because it'll already incur a credit for the web results before you click on images
Skipping past the top two sponsored results in DDG really isn't that big a deal and still diversifies the search market from Google's monopoly, so paying the equivalent of a streaming subscription service... idk. None of my friends seem interested in paying for what is currently free (on top of the hassle of being logged in everywhere all the time) so sharing a duo/family account isn't an option for me either. Maybe that's something that would put it in reach for you?
Edit: apparently they've shared what it costs them to provide the service:
They charge 54€$/year for 3600 searches, which is.... precisely 1.5 cents per search. That sounds a little bit too convenient that the claimed cost price is precisely what they charge
This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs. Maybe this is total expenses divided by number of searches being run? I.e., it includes wages for the devs working on new features, their administration, etc. (fixed costs) and isn't actually the expense that each additional search incurs to deliver
DDG displays up to 2 ads above search results (most of the time I get none: trying just now, I saw 1 ad when doing two product searches and one knowledge search). The most favorable figure for 1000 ad impressions is 6$ according to <https://spideraf.com/learning-hub/what-is-the-average-cost-p...>. That's 0.6 cents per ad if the advertising network costs nothing. Advertising on DDG goes via Microsoft, so they'll take a cut: <https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/adverti...>. Guessing that they take 10% (I expect it's more), you're looking at 0.2 cents average revenue for each search I did just now. (Not a reliable figure but as a ballpark estimate.) DDG must have much lower costs somehow (maybe they just take results from Bing verbatim and have few costs of their own)
hedora · 31d ago
Their privacy pass thing lets you run searches in a way that doesn’t let them associate the query with your account, so the privacy half of the “always logged in” problem is mostly solved.
I switched from DDG. It saves me more than $10/month, both in time and in actual dollar costs due to suboptimal search engine results. It’s as simple as that.
The jump in improvement from google to ddg is probably bigger than the jump from ddg to kagi though. Also, I switched before ddg and kagi had AI search. Kagi’s AI is a huge differentiator for me, and I haven’t used the DDG one that much.
Aachen · 31d ago
What would solve the "always logged in" problem is if I can enter a 6-digit PIN to use the service on a random computer or VM
I also can't associate searches I do for work with a personal account, and installing special software (this privacy pass client) is also iffy, so that's not going to work for people like me
Otherwise I'll have to use a publicly accessible search engine all the time anyway, since there's no way I can get my boss to pay for a search engine when I can't even get him to pay for our primary communications mechanism (calls and chat) that is hosted by a third party relying on donations
wartijn_ · 31d ago
> This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs.
It seems pretty save to assume that the average user will search less than 300 times when 300 is the limit.
It’s of course possible for users to search exactly 300 each month before they stop searching or use an other provider, but my guess is that most people who regularly hit that limit will either stop using Kagi or move to a more expensive plan.
And that €54/$54 is the price when you pay per year, if you pay per month you’re paying more per search (although at least part of that extra money will go towards handling the payments)
jwr · 31d 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.
jwr · 31d ago
Update: I am no longer a Kagi user. I learned that they work with Russian companies and I can't support that for moral reasons. I canceled my subscription.
A real pity.
bosie · 31d ago
what do you use instead?
28304283409234 · 31d ago
And when they release Orion on Linux I can FINALLY pay for a browser (again). IMHO Kagi is doing what I expect Mozilla Foundation to be doing.
geraltofrivia · 31d ago
Based on my limited understanding, making a rendering engine (what mozilla folks are doing) and making a browser using existing rendering engines (what firefox is, what probably-but-im-not-really-sure Orion is) are different in terms of complexity by orders of magnitude.
28304283409234 · 30d ago
I know. Everyone here knows. This relates to my comment how?
iLoveOncall · 31d ago
Yet if you were to base yourself off of the attention they get on HN you'd think it's the largest search engine in the universe.
I'm tired about seeing all those posts about Kagi. I have yet to see a single example where it outperforms Google. People just don't know how to search.
Every time someone claims Google is becoming bad, ask them to share what they're looking for and how they search for it, and where the problem lies becomes glaringly obvious.
nicce · 31d ago
A similar take would be that why use LLMs to query information since we can use normal search and still find the results. Defaults and usability matters.
iLoveOncall · 31d ago
That's probably the worst analogy one could make when trying to show that one system is superior to another when we all know and experience daily that LLMs hallucinate search results all the time and are completely unreliable.
My original point is that Kagi is NOT better than Google at search.
nicce · 31d ago
I think you missed the point - for masses the correctness matters less than average usability and efficiency of getting results that are good enough most of the time.
yesfitz · 31d ago
Can you share some examples of obvious problems with how people use Google?
iLoveOncall · 31d ago
Just searching with extremely poor keywords is the most common problem I've noticed. It's a search engine, not an interpretation engine.
I have never ever had a problem with search. If I can't find something on Google it means it simply doesn't exist.
yesfitz · 31d ago
Do you use an ad-blocker on desktop and mobile?
With my ad-blocker enabled, I was able to replicate your results for the "expedited passport renewal" search. (state.gov right under the AI Overview)
Then I disabled my ad-blocker, and the sponsored results and AI Overview pushed the first actual result (still state.gov) below the fold.
iLoveOncall · 31d ago
Not on mobile which is what I used that day.
Actually for me the AI overview does show up but BELOW the official government's website (and there's no ad at all).
Aldipower · 31d ago
I've used Kagi the last month and was quite satisfied.
But the payment model (not the price) is completely PITA.
I did a pre-payment of 15 $ via PayPal. First this options is extremely hidden.
Second after I reached the limit of searches for the month, I could not get additional searches for the month, but had to wait for the next. So I was blocked with searching and I moved back to Google. My left-over 7$ are rotting there now.
gonzalohm · 31d ago
You can use the remaining credit the next month. But why would you add $15 as credit when you can get unlimited searches for $10?
Someone1234 · 31d ago
Because some people prefer Pay-Per-Use rather than yet another Subscription. I am one of them; even my cellphone plan is Pay-Per-Use which can both be cheaper or more than a subscription, but in both cases I am in the driver's seat.
gonzalohm · 25d ago
But adding credit to a wallet is not pay per use. Utilities like electricity are pay per use. I also prefer that, but I don't want to randomly guess how much money I need to put in a wallet for a service
muzzy19 · 31d ago
We desperately need from Kagi:
1. Change jurisdiction to Switzerland
2. Build (or at least partner with someone) to build an independent index
3. Extend services to paid e-mail, collaboration and other tools of a whole ecosystem.
I'm ready to pay!
1270018080 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d ago
The !gmaps and !gflights bangs are available.
sph · 31d ago
Yet the !g bang does not work any more.
I get that they want to replace Google, but removing such a bang is user-hostile and I'm unhappy about it for those 2 times a month I need to compare with Google's results.
EDIT: nvm it works iff you add the bang at the start of the query, for some reason.
robin_reala · 31d ago
It does? I just tested with "!g test" and got redirected to https://www.google.com/search?q=test as expected. Not that I ever really use that bang any more given how bad Google’s results have become.
sph · 31d ago
Ah, it works only at the start of the query.
I always put it at the end (you do a normal query, and add the bang the second time around) which used to work on DDG which introduced them.
joseda-hg · 31d ago
Just tested and it works both at the start and at the end
Maybe there's a setting for it?
Veen · 31d ago
It does work. Your problem may be different, but it temporarily stopped working for me because I set "Search Engine to Redirect" in the Kagi Extension to Google (because my browser search engine default was Google). My "!g" searches ended up being redirected back to Kagi. It started working again when I changed the browser default and extension to something different.
nicce · 31d ago
I thought you can add your own bangs as well.
raffael_de · 31d ago
bang first or last works both for me.
raffael_de · 31d ago
!gm also works for maps.
torrance · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Googles seemingly inexorable slide into becoming unusable seems to have picked up speed around then.
simoncion · 31d ago
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.
cyberax · 31d 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.
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…
Unearned5161 · 31d 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
bicepjai · 31d 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 · 31d ago
You can get unlimited searches for $10/month.
looshch · 31d ago
and they would reach this milestone faster if they haven’t spent money on silly t-shirts and AI which made some folks to lose their faith in Kagi. I personally quitted my subscription after this
jemmyw · 31d ago
why do you care about these things exactly? Please explain a bit more. You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts? That's not exactly like "I like the company products but I don't agree with them signing up for military contracts". It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on?
On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there. I'm pretty pleased with their AI implementation. In search it only activates if you append a question mark. Their assistant is a pretty good alternative chat interface, it lets you choose the model. I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models. It has probably fallen behind the tooling others have at this point though.
looshch · 30d ago
sure
> You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts [...] It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on?
i like the service, but spending money on t-shirts seems unreasonable to me. I'm sure there are a dozen things which would benefit from the money and time which were spent on manufacturing clothes. From their own blog post [1]:
> The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database
which sounds to me like not the best way to spend the company's time
also:
> why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts
all their answers to that question they asked themselves in the same blog post seem silly to me. Go give bonuses to your employees, upgrade devices, make a company event, etc
> On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there
absolutely not! If i want an AI search result, i go to an AI provider of choice. Again, i don't think that should be their focus
> I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models
replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me — i cancelled Kagi subscription because i use claude as a search engine
I still don't understand about the t-shirt thing. Companies spend their money on all kinds of things that are apart from their core offering. Like lavish office buildings, on-sites, big paychecks for executives, charity donations. I don't think I could buy anything from anyone if I needed to go line by line through their accounts to make sure I approved of everything.
> replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me
... like, ok. But now I'm confused. You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. With kagi I can use chatgpt, claude, others. But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is.
Kagi is not for you - fine, I'd have no problem with that. But the way you've written your comments is that you do like the service but you didn't like what the company did in other ways... not a moral objection but that it wasn't, in your view, an efficient use of their time. And I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant which is why I've asked questions about it.
looshch · 29d ago
> Companies spend their money on all kinds of things that are apart from their core offering [...] I don't think I could buy anything from anyone if I needed to go line by line through their accounts to make sure I approved of everything
you are dead right, but spending nearly a third of the total revenue sounds like a waste for me. They aren’t an established company, they are still very small in terms of users. I would be way happier seeing them re-investing in growth. If they would signal somewhere at any point they want to keep being small, i would totally get their move with the t-shirts. Since they haven’t mentioned it even once to my best knowledge, i assume they are taking the traditional path which is growth
> You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. [...] But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is
i pay for the pro version which has CLI support, it’s crucial for me and lets me to almost never leave my natural habitat, terminal. Also it has bigger context windows, bigger token limits, better everything, which i don’t believe i can achieve with Kagi’s subscription. I’m strong proponent of the Unix philosophy: each thing should do only one thing and do it well. To me AI, just like t-shirts, is an unaffordable luxury which a company like Kagi at the moment absolutely shouldn’t even look at. You may argue that in the modern world AI seems like a next logical evolutional step of search engines — but to me is trying to be a jack of all trades, master of few. I paid for the product for 2 years, i expected different things. Give me bigger limits of include/exclude website lists in lenses, maintain your own blacklist of garbage websites like pinterest (you can even use AI for this), create a public collection of easily discoverable lenses, give better local searches like the ones google provide. I didn’t get any of that, and then i received an email about my t-shirt being ready to be shipped — and shipping wasn’t free by the way, which was confusing to me personally after so much noise about free t-shirts. That subtle detail, still paid shipping, was another putting off factor, which seemed like a dark marketing pattern
> I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant
sorry, i didn’t get that, can you please explain what you are sure about that i didn’t mean something?
dakial1 · 30d ago
Ok Hackernews, you convinced to test it out.
But from my first days experience I can safely say that 300 searches a month is a low number for entry pricing. And given that I'm in a developing country, the entry pricing is also not cheap enough.
But I'll keep pushing for a couple of months.
zipping1549 · 31d ago
Been a satisfied customer for more than a year now. Pretty worried about sustainability of the service.
malnourish · 31d ago
Extremely happy ultimate tier subscriber. I like Orion, but I hope they focus mostly on Kagi.
joshjob42 · 30d ago
I love Orion and it'd be my main browser if only a) Vimium worked and b) they'd add or enable web panel extensions ala old Zen, Vivaldi, or Edge. I'd pay $30/mo to use Kagi such an Orion.
zxexz · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Why not set it up as your default search engine? That’s what I did. Hard to forget when it’s the default
zxexz · 26d ago
I dunno, I guess out of principle I don't like my 'defaults' to be something I have to be logged into.
KingOfCoders · 31d ago
Y-axis starts at "48,961" -> marketing (of course). Not taking you seriously.
akarlsten · 31d 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".
KingOfCoders · 31d ago
1.) Not sure how that relates to the non-0 y-axis
2.) Switching to "All Data" also doesn't set the y-axis to zero, but to 6,840.
Having an y-axis set not to zero is in the majority a sign of people who want to inflate growth.
Not zero indexing is misleading if you are comparing discrete things like GPU performance, not in the case of plotting a timeline graph. Their published stats could be seen as misleading if they only displayed a short and/or a specific timeline (excluding the latest data for example).
freediver · 31d ago
Or people who didn’t care about growth at all, only to start measuring it at 6840 customers. Hint: It is the latter :)
KingOfCoders · 30d ago
Hint: This has nothing to do with a zero y-axis, why would one need to have a zero value to have the y-axis start at zero?
The reason to have a non-zero y-axis for time series is to amplify changes, e.g. the changes might be to small to see with a zeroed y-axis. Or you have ups and downs and want to compare them, with a zeroed y-axis again the changes might be too small to compare.
Whenever you want to show growth, a non-zero y-axis is usually a sign that the aim is to overstate growth, because we as humans estimate growth by the steepness of the graph, not by the numbers. A non-zero y-axis creates a much steeper graph and thus growth is perceived much higher than it is.
SamFromSpace · 31d ago
The button right underneath toggles between “Recent” and “All Data”.
skarat · 31d 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 · 31d ago
They also announced a Linux version in early 2026.
zkanda · 31d ago
I used to be a subscriber and would like to support the project, but the noticeable response latency is a problem for me (Spain). I’ve tried both my desktop PC and iPhone, and the result is the same unfortunately.
submeta · 31d ago
Happy customer here. This is what Google used to be years ago. Love it.
Haeuserschlucht · 31d ago
Kagi is something to be paid for that others offer for free. All of them collect your data, regardless what they claim. So just go with the free versions.
miloignis · 31d ago
Do you have any evidence that they collect your data?
They go so far as to have an API to generate cryptographic proof of subscription tokens without revealing your identity for searching when using Tor, etc ( https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html ).
Beyond their data collection stance, which I believe, their results are better and worth paying for because they don't have all the extra ads and crap shoved in them and allow you to modify your own website rankings, etc.
Haeuserschlucht · 28d ago
First of all I have to ask: Do you work for them? Be honest.
As long as I cannot access their data, cannot see their systems on a continuous basis, they can collect my data. The same applies to DuckDuckGo and the same applies to VPN services.
So at Kagi they are aware of Tor, they are aware of the Dark Web. If you even talk about this on your website, of course you find ways to circumvent privacy there.
I tested Kagi and my experience is the results are even with or worse than what other services present like Google or Bing or even Perplexity. And if you don't like advertising, just use an ad blocker. I'm so surprised that so many people don't seem to do this and they always complain about ads. Just use an ad blocker already.
So they allow me to modify my own website ranking. Well, if almost nobody uses this website, that's pointless. Besides, if I could modify my website ranking, so can everybody else. And now we are back to search engine optimization.
miloignis · 27d ago
Nope, I'm completely unaffiliated with Kagi, just a happy customer for a year and a half or so.
I don't understand all of your objections, but it sounds like you're operating in a very strict "if I can't verify it myself continually, then I don't trust it at all", which I think is far too black-and-white. Trust exists on a scale, is built up slowly over time, depends on your threat model, etc.
I don't want an adversarial relationship with my search engine where they try to show me enough ads to make money to stay afloat and I try to block enough ads so my experience isn't miserable - this isn't any fun, and one of us will lose.
On the other hand, I can pay Kagi, and they are incentivized to give me the best service possible so that I continue paying them and recommend them to others. It's far more positive, and a better outcome for us both. And it's working - I have a much better experience on Kagi than Google or elsewhere, and I have kept paying them and recommending them to others entirely organically - I don't think there's even a referral program, I'm certainly not using one.
They say they don't collect my data, and why would they? They don't show ads, and if anyone ever found out they were lying their paying customers would leave in droves. Furthermore, they take actions to back up their claims, like integrating the Privacy Pass feature.
Finally, they don't allow you to modify your website ranking for others - they let you modify how other websites rank for you. You get to personalize how you want websites to be ranked for you when you make a search, which is a very cool feature.
Anyway, if you tried it and didn't like the search results, no problem! You can use something else. I don't think that your other objections are valid, though.
FergusArgyll · 31d ago
I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I use google exclusively and have never (as in - not once) seen a Pinterest result.
iLoveOncall · 31d ago
For text search it never shows up, but in image searches it's a real plague.
To be fair I think Google has lowered their position a lot in the results because it used to be that it would be 80% Pinterest results and now even in images it's only a few here and there.
I think they understood that everyone hates that website.
FergusArgyll · 31d ago
That explains it! I don't use image search. Thanks, I thought I was going crazy. ..
mdrzn · 29d ago
Why is this page translated by default with no indication that I can change the language? Very weird.
nektro · 31d ago
congrats on the milestone!
bitdeep · 31d ago
Using it as my default search for my browser and mobile (on mobile is abit hard to setup).
Migrate fully, after Google first search turned into a cesspool of scam AD's and SEO crap.
ed_mercer · 31d 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.
freediver · 31d ago
I feel we are already winning the battle vs Google. How many people pay for Google? :)
0xCE0 · 31d ago
Google search is already dead/zombie. Borderline useless cesspool.
treeshateorcs · 31d ago
i wonder what happened on may 29th when *teams* hit a plunge
moebrowne · 31d ago
Check the y-axis scale, the 'plunge' is from 185 to 183
zoul · 31d 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.
pshirshov · 31d ago
It's good but way too expensive. 10 searches per day for $5/month doesn't feel fair.
Local deep searches with ollama are comparable in quality and cost nothing.
Also, half of their premium model list is laughable - 32/70b models can be run locally without an issue.
moralestapia · 31d ago
Ooof ... I thought they were doing way better.
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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d 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 · 31d ago
Lets see your napkin math.
Aurornis · 31d 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 · 31d ago
It’s deductible if you run a small company.
drawfloat · 31d ago
But it’s still an additional expense that many do not need.
sshine · 31d 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.
TylerE · 31d ago
Alternatively: People really really hate micropayments and metered billing.
dymk · 31d ago
They offer unlimited searches for $10/month, you don’t need to do metered billing
sshine · 31d 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 · 31d 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.
eviks · 31d 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 · 31d ago
50k paying users is not nothing. And the trendline points in the right direction. Also, the products are good.
moralestapia · 31d ago
Can you cite the part of my comment where I wrote "50k users is nothing"?
sshine · 31d ago
> Ooof ... I thought they were doing way better.
No comments yet
jan_g · 31d 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 · 31d ago
They took 92 presumably smaller investors, so no VC.
bruce511 · 31d 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 · 31d 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
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
These are legal and contractual proceedings, with strict definitions of terms by law, not by popular opinion in the hacker community.
"Underlying motivations" of the investors is never a legal factor in any kind of investment deal. That's not something that can be accounted for by any kind of contract.
I would not have guessed that. Why would I need a VC firm to invest a few thousand dollars into a company?
They raised money in the form of SAFE notes, in which case a venture capital firm is created (you can also call it a legal entity or a juridical person) and each investor owns a part of that firm in proportion to the money they invest. That firm in turn will have a contract with the startup company which details and regulates how the invested funds in the future can be transformed to actual shares.
Key difference: They didn’t take any funding from anyone whose values are misaligned with their own
No comments yet
If you can bootstrap it yourself then there's no need to do this, but those that bring in investors will need an exit.
You just never hear about them because they’re small and like the businesses they invest in, they’re satisfied with moderate returns.
You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines.
The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
No comments yet
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
he said, typing from Firefox with its new "open AI chatbot" sidebar button
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.
Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good.
But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid.
He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right").
I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults.
Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it.
From their website:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
American companies, startups in particular, have terrible support. It's really nice to have actual contact with someone when an issue arises.
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.
Edit: And the insane values these days are P/E of 90+, bad businesses are less than 5, so I took a conservative estimate of 10 P/E, but I think a more reasonable number might actually be 40, putting them in the centimillion category for sure.
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.
No comments yet
[1]: https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-t...
> Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot. We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation
In other words, maybe they’re saying they don’t have any BS jobs like Meta and Google seem to have.
Google’s HR review team that reviews the team that reviews interview processes is probably larger than Kagi.
I doubt you can get a feeling for the work / life balance from this half sentence.
No comments yet
If search works well, the result you wanted is in the first spot on page #1. This is a bad outcome for Google.
The more follow up searches you run and the more trash you wade through, the more ads you see and the more money Google makes.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
It also uses other indices along Google.
Unsurprisingly it's Pintrest that annoys people the most.
I haven't used Kagi much, but I don't think I've ever seen a single Pinterest result from any other search engine, I barely even know what the thing is for.
Is this a US thing? A Kagi quirk specifically?
And to be honest, I don't see as much Pintrest crap as I used to. It may just be that it has fallen out of favour because of its terrible design. But it was a site that basically let you create mood boards from images that you found as your browsed.
The big problem with it was that it simply copied the image so if you were looking for anything, Pintrest came up with the images for a product but then had removed all the source so it just flooded search results with uncited references and you couldn't find anything useful.
Reverse image searching to find sites thst sold a prpduct became useless.
> 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.
Here's a list for the curious:
>A look at search engines with their own indexes
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
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?
Does ublock or ddg etc block sponsored results?
I also have my own WTFs with Google, I even started collecting them: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59
First one on Kagi is the official US government ESTA website.
Let others handle rarer queries.
Hopefully, now that they've proven that you can create a profitable company from doing this, more will follow and we'll get a proper ecosystem.
Like others, I'd prefer to see Kagi succeed at being the best possible search engine and nothing else, than try and do the Google thing and do everything.
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.
There exists exactly 0 business structures that can solve the problem of 100.00% of a userbase being completely satisfied with all decision-making.
Soon those users will stop caring about the product that they use, but rather about the value of the underlying share/s.
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.
Out of curiosity, what communication do you want to see between your mail service and search service? Half of what I'd like to get out of paying is keeping them separate!
I'll rephrase to state that I'd much rather have a unix-like philosophy where you have small-ish companies each specializing and being very good at one thing and then you have an active medium they all live in and talk together and hold hands and...
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?
Do people really use web search that little? According to the stats Kagi shows me, I make about 50-100 web searches every day on average.
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.
Though training data sets based on private information about people are worth more to them, so they focus on that.
That lets them do things like run crooked ad auctions that screw websites and advertisers, intentionally worsen search results exactly enough to maximize profits, and other stuff that came out during their trial.
That problem has been solved for anybody who wants it solved, through Apple Pay and Google Pay, or even the built-in feature in the browser for remembering credit cards.
Normal people absolutely would not accept websites hi-jacking their computer to mine crypto and hardware manufacturers like Apple would swiftly implement measures to protect users from those freaks.
And no, there is only those 2 solutions.
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.
Plus, it seems like having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person. It's probably easier for them to associate my activity with me when I log in than it is for DDG or Google to track my activity when I'm not logged in and can't be easily distinguished from the dozen other people that used that computer that day.
Yes, this is annoying. They make it as easy as they can (QR code login, session links) but it's still a speedbump.
> having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person.
That's a legitimate concern. Kagi added Privacy Pass support to mitigate it
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
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.
I replaced it with a "let's fetch" shortcut.
It does indeed, as was revealed during the Google Search antitrust case in the DDG testimony.
The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.
On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension.
On desktop Safari, you can additionally make Kagi your home page. Not as convenient as searching directly from the top bar but not bad either.
The extension is a hack that allows them to redirect the searches from one of the available search engines to Kagi. So first you search, then e.g. the DDG page loads halfway, then the page flashes, you get redirected to Kagi. If you are lucky, you are signed in, and you wait for the Kagi results. If not, you sign in and type your search again.
On iOS, I made a shortcut that pops up a native text prompt for your search, then opens Kagi using your session token. I recommend this over the extension, it is fast snd reliable.
Wikipedia first. No Pinterest, no W3Schools, no Fox etc etc.
They have a nice list for suggestions.
The results aren't necessarily better than other search engines in general but the personalization is so incredibly valuable.
Oh and having it auto rewrite Reddit results to Old Reddit helps a lot too.
I stopped using duckduckgo after they censored tankman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I found that have two main use cases:
1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.
2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.
I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.
Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.
For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.
2) Yeah this is the one thing I still use google for. Though they did recently update Kagi maps (a weeka ago I think?).
I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).
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.)
I keep trying chatgpt style products, but rarely reach for them because I don’t really have a concrete use case for them. I use ? all the time, code completion at work and regularly generate images. Generic chat can do those things but is never as good as specialized tools I have access to.
My guess is that purpose-built specialized expert AIs are going to end up being more useful than the “everything” products like the chatgpt UI, but time will tell, I guess.
I have no numbers but I bet my # of searches/day went down drastically because of that alone.
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...
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?
As someone in the EU/Schengen, I need results for 3 languages or 4 regions (if "worldwide" counts as one region) on a weekly basis. If a Dutch payment method would mean getting only Dutch results, it would be about as valuable as a newspaper with all pages about trade and international affairs blacked out: you'd need to buy it for every region you're interested in which probably surpasses the original price
My lattes are far less expensive than that.
Skipping past the top two sponsored results in DDG really isn't that big a deal and still diversifies the search market from Google's monopoly, so paying the equivalent of a streaming subscription service... idk. None of my friends seem interested in paying for what is currently free (on top of the hassle of being logged in everywhere all the time) so sharing a duo/family account isn't an option for me either. Maybe that's something that would put it in reach for you?
Edit: apparently they've shared what it costs them to provide the service:
> a single search costs us 1.5 cents to deliver
https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing/23
They charge 54€$/year for 3600 searches, which is.... precisely 1.5 cents per search. That sounds a little bit too convenient that the claimed cost price is precisely what they charge
This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs. Maybe this is total expenses divided by number of searches being run? I.e., it includes wages for the devs working on new features, their administration, etc. (fixed costs) and isn't actually the expense that each additional search incurs to deliver
DDG displays up to 2 ads above search results (most of the time I get none: trying just now, I saw 1 ad when doing two product searches and one knowledge search). The most favorable figure for 1000 ad impressions is 6$ according to <https://spideraf.com/learning-hub/what-is-the-average-cost-p...>. That's 0.6 cents per ad if the advertising network costs nothing. Advertising on DDG goes via Microsoft, so they'll take a cut: <https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/adverti...>. Guessing that they take 10% (I expect it's more), you're looking at 0.2 cents average revenue for each search I did just now. (Not a reliable figure but as a ballpark estimate.) DDG must have much lower costs somehow (maybe they just take results from Bing verbatim and have few costs of their own)
I switched from DDG. It saves me more than $10/month, both in time and in actual dollar costs due to suboptimal search engine results. It’s as simple as that.
The jump in improvement from google to ddg is probably bigger than the jump from ddg to kagi though. Also, I switched before ddg and kagi had AI search. Kagi’s AI is a huge differentiator for me, and I haven’t used the DDG one that much.
I also can't associate searches I do for work with a personal account, and installing special software (this privacy pass client) is also iffy, so that's not going to work for people like me
Otherwise I'll have to use a publicly accessible search engine all the time anyway, since there's no way I can get my boss to pay for a search engine when I can't even get him to pay for our primary communications mechanism (calls and chat) that is hosted by a third party relying on donations
And that €54/$54 is the price when you pay per year, if you pay per month you’re paying more per search (although at least part of that extra money will go towards handling the payments)
I am tired of being advertising meat, and I'm willing to pay to use the services that do not waste my time.
A real pity.
I'm tired about seeing all those posts about Kagi. I have yet to see a single example where it outperforms Google. People just don't know how to search.
Every time someone claims Google is becoming bad, ask them to share what they're looking for and how they search for it, and where the problem lies becomes glaringly obvious.
My original point is that Kagi is NOT better than Google at search.
Also simply bad faith.
Check my response to this article and the thread of comments that ensued for a pretty recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43829655
I have never ever had a problem with search. If I can't find something on Google it means it simply doesn't exist.
With my ad-blocker enabled, I was able to replicate your results for the "expedited passport renewal" search. (state.gov right under the AI Overview)
Then I disabled my ad-blocker, and the sponsored results and AI Overview pushed the first actual result (still state.gov) below the fold.
Actually for me the AI overview does show up but BELOW the official government's website (and there's no ad at all).
I get that they want to replace Google, but removing such a bang is user-hostile and I'm unhappy about it for those 2 times a month I need to compare with Google's results.
EDIT: nvm it works iff you add the bang at the start of the query, for some reason.
I always put it at the end (you do a normal query, and add the bang the second time around) which used to work on DDG which introduced them.
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.
Somehow, Google decided to show me the ferry timetable: https://imgur.com/a/bgFax59
Like, whut?
On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there. I'm pretty pleased with their AI implementation. In search it only activates if you append a question mark. Their assistant is a pretty good alternative chat interface, it lets you choose the model. I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models. It has probably fallen behind the tooling others have at this point though.
> You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts [...] It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on?
i like the service, but spending money on t-shirts seems unreasonable to me. I'm sure there are a dozen things which would benefit from the money and time which were spent on manufacturing clothes. From their own blog post [1]:
> The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database
which sounds to me like not the best way to spend the company's time
also:
> why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts
all their answers to that question they asked themselves in the same blog post seem silly to me. Go give bonuses to your employees, upgrade devices, make a company event, etc
> On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there
absolutely not! If i want an AI search result, i go to an AI provider of choice. Again, i don't think that should be their focus
> I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models
replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me — i cancelled Kagi subscription because i use claude as a search engine
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
> replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me
... like, ok. But now I'm confused. You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. With kagi I can use chatgpt, claude, others. But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is.
Kagi is not for you - fine, I'd have no problem with that. But the way you've written your comments is that you do like the service but you didn't like what the company did in other ways... not a moral objection but that it wasn't, in your view, an efficient use of their time. And I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant which is why I've asked questions about it.
you are dead right, but spending nearly a third of the total revenue sounds like a waste for me. They aren’t an established company, they are still very small in terms of users. I would be way happier seeing them re-investing in growth. If they would signal somewhere at any point they want to keep being small, i would totally get their move with the t-shirts. Since they haven’t mentioned it even once to my best knowledge, i assume they are taking the traditional path which is growth
> You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. [...] But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is
i pay for the pro version which has CLI support, it’s crucial for me and lets me to almost never leave my natural habitat, terminal. Also it has bigger context windows, bigger token limits, better everything, which i don’t believe i can achieve with Kagi’s subscription. I’m strong proponent of the Unix philosophy: each thing should do only one thing and do it well. To me AI, just like t-shirts, is an unaffordable luxury which a company like Kagi at the moment absolutely shouldn’t even look at. You may argue that in the modern world AI seems like a next logical evolutional step of search engines — but to me is trying to be a jack of all trades, master of few. I paid for the product for 2 years, i expected different things. Give me bigger limits of include/exclude website lists in lenses, maintain your own blacklist of garbage websites like pinterest (you can even use AI for this), create a public collection of easily discoverable lenses, give better local searches like the ones google provide. I didn’t get any of that, and then i received an email about my t-shirt being ready to be shipped — and shipping wasn’t free by the way, which was confusing to me personally after so much noise about free t-shirts. That subtle detail, still paid shipping, was another putting off factor, which seemed like a dark marketing pattern
> I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant
sorry, i didn’t get that, can you please explain what you are sure about that i didn’t mean something?
But from my first days experience I can safely say that 300 searches a month is a low number for entry pricing. And given that I'm in a developing country, the entry pricing is also not cheap enough.
But I'll keep pushing for a couple of months.
2.) Switching to "All Data" also doesn't set the y-axis to zero, but to 6,840.
Having an y-axis set not to zero is in the majority a sign of people who want to inflate growth.
Not zero indexing is misleading if you are comparing discrete things like GPU performance, not in the case of plotting a timeline graph. Their published stats could be seen as misleading if they only displayed a short and/or a specific timeline (excluding the latest data for example).
The reason to have a non-zero y-axis for time series is to amplify changes, e.g. the changes might be to small to see with a zeroed y-axis. Or you have ups and downs and want to compare them, with a zeroed y-axis again the changes might be too small to compare.
Whenever you want to show growth, a non-zero y-axis is usually a sign that the aim is to overstate growth, because we as humans estimate growth by the steepness of the graph, not by the numbers. A non-zero y-axis creates a much steeper graph and thus growth is perceived much higher than it is.
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.
They go so far as to have an API to generate cryptographic proof of subscription tokens without revealing your identity for searching when using Tor, etc ( https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html ).
Beyond their data collection stance, which I believe, their results are better and worth paying for because they don't have all the extra ads and crap shoved in them and allow you to modify your own website rankings, etc.
As long as I cannot access their data, cannot see their systems on a continuous basis, they can collect my data. The same applies to DuckDuckGo and the same applies to VPN services.
So at Kagi they are aware of Tor, they are aware of the Dark Web. If you even talk about this on your website, of course you find ways to circumvent privacy there.
I tested Kagi and my experience is the results are even with or worse than what other services present like Google or Bing or even Perplexity. And if you don't like advertising, just use an ad blocker. I'm so surprised that so many people don't seem to do this and they always complain about ads. Just use an ad blocker already.
So they allow me to modify my own website ranking. Well, if almost nobody uses this website, that's pointless. Besides, if I could modify my website ranking, so can everybody else. And now we are back to search engine optimization.
I don't understand all of your objections, but it sounds like you're operating in a very strict "if I can't verify it myself continually, then I don't trust it at all", which I think is far too black-and-white. Trust exists on a scale, is built up slowly over time, depends on your threat model, etc.
I don't want an adversarial relationship with my search engine where they try to show me enough ads to make money to stay afloat and I try to block enough ads so my experience isn't miserable - this isn't any fun, and one of us will lose.
On the other hand, I can pay Kagi, and they are incentivized to give me the best service possible so that I continue paying them and recommend them to others. It's far more positive, and a better outcome for us both. And it's working - I have a much better experience on Kagi than Google or elsewhere, and I have kept paying them and recommending them to others entirely organically - I don't think there's even a referral program, I'm certainly not using one.
They say they don't collect my data, and why would they? They don't show ads, and if anyone ever found out they were lying their paying customers would leave in droves. Furthermore, they take actions to back up their claims, like integrating the Privacy Pass feature.
Finally, they don't allow you to modify your website ranking for others - they let you modify how other websites rank for you. You get to personalize how you want websites to be ranked for you when you make a search, which is a very cool feature.
Anyway, if you tried it and didn't like the search results, no problem! You can use something else. I don't think that your other objections are valid, though.
To be fair I think Google has lowered their position a lot in the results because it used to be that it would be 80% Pinterest results and now even in images it's only a few here and there.
I think they understood that everyone hates that website.
Migrate fully, after Google first search turned into a cesspool of scam AD's and SEO crap.
Local deep searches with ollama are comparable in quality and cost nothing.
Also, half of their premium model list is laughable - 32/70b models can be run locally without an issue.
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.
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.
No comments yet
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.