I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes).
Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)
I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).
Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.
Fair, maybe oversimplified for the sake of the above comment.
Rather, I asked the Neeva support person if the $6 price was sustainable, and if they foresaw a need to raise prices. I mentioned that Kagi called out increased costs from Bing, and asked if Neeva was impacted as well, and whether $6 was enough to support their costs.
I was hoping to mostly just let them know that customers care about this stuff, but they responded to me by saying that they have an in-house index and Bing costs are not a problem for them, due to their private index.
So even though they likely answered my question honestly that Bing costs increasing didn’t impact them as much as it did Kagi, it seems they had much bigger cost problems instead!
Can't say for sure, but Neeva I don't think failed because they couldn't keep the business going. It was always a game of perseverance going up against Google Search that not only is free but has tremendous distribution advantages (through Android and Chrome).
DuckDuckGo is at it after all these years, building it brick by brick, if you will. Neeva's problem might have been the opportunity cost to their engineering and executive orgs in pursuing such a drawn out build. They'd rather latch onto something that could grow much faster, and frankly, Enterpise + LLMs is right in their alley. It is a nice pivot and not representative of much else (don't mean to discount that consumer products are hard, especially when the competition is BigTech themselves).
I think Neeva needed user signup growth more than it needed cash. It was reasonably well funded through VC. If it had shown adoption growth they would have received more VC money to continue even if they were losing money on each user.
Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.
How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?
I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.
> How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?
More features (lenses, explicit personalization), more results (it’s bing + google indexes + extra), and better results (IMO).
> I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account.
Many don’t, but you lose a lot of what makes it so much better without it.
> They can then associate all of your searches to that account
Yes, but then the rationale is that they are so expensive, so they don’t need to do shady shit like that. Currently, they don’t even save your history which is planned as an optional feature for later (so you can look into your own history).
These wishful projections of benevolent intent are thoroughly unconvincing.
Do they accept mail-in payment like some vpn or email providers that are recommended on this site, and use a random string to connect that money to a payment plan? Because that would actually back up their intent with concrete action.
If not, there is no reason to trust their declarations of good deeds. And encouraging people to trust them because "they can make money by other means" is disingenous and ridiculous.
Slightly unrelated, but Google has become increasingly less accurate at returning pages. I am looking for a change even outside of its huge privacy violations.
This is a big part of it! Google has genuinely dropped the ball on search. Kagi tends to be better than google, or at least comparable. Not on every search, but often enough. And their ability to rank up/down/block certain websites is actually really useful!
Ads are (often) a distraction. Mostly my brain just ignores them, but occasionally they trick me to some sidetrack and I forget for a while what I was doing.
Using an adblock isn’t enough as the ads are embedded into the results, and very subtlety called out. If your query even remotely resembles something related to shopping (in the eyes of Google) you will get spammed with localized ads.
Kagi has good quality search results (better than Google in many cases), works well and has no ads or promoted content. I'm personally not using it for extreme privacy / anonymity reasons, I just want a good experience using the search engine.
Not really. I set my VPN endpoint to Sweden, disabled adblock and Google started showing me ads in Swedish. Also back when I still used my Google acc they showed me ads for things that I've already bought. Their adtech stuff is way dumber than you think it is.
That browser requires an account. Most people use it with a google account, because they are using gmail and other google services. So their adtech doesn't need to be that smart.
Why bother trying to track a Firefox user who uses a VPN and an adblock when most of your users don't even bother to hide from you?
The search results are better. That's why I'm using it. The privacy part is not important to me, but having the best search results possible is important. I'm done wasting my time.
Aside, but it’s so crazy to me that both Chrome and Firefox lack this option. There are third party extensions for it, which is the official solution, but I’d rather minimize the number of third-party extensions I use.
I setup account limits to the $25 water mark with the plan to just swap to that, probably for the annual re-up option.
Then today I noticed they upped their quota. Talk about timing. Ill proabbly stick to monthly for a while. Honestly not sure what is better for them, a monthly sub or an annual (at a discounted rate). As it looks I'll probably be around 1k searches a month.
> It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab bar that doesn’t look like a hack).
Huh? Firefox has had great vertical tabs, thanks to Tree Style Tabs, for decades. Orion doesn’t supper hierarchical tabs, like Firefox does.
I use Orion and Brave, both of which are experimenting with vertical tabs, but if Firefox were as fast as Brave I’d be full-time on that. The tabbed browsing experience on Firefox has always been the best, in my book.
I used Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but it looks like it was tacked-on (because it is). Also Firefox doesn’t have a good way to hide the normal top tab bar, so you have to go into browser-chrome CSS and hide some UI elements.
Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1]
The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.
Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.
To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.
How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.
>AI should be used to support users, not replace them
Doesn't square. AI doesn't replace your users? it threatens to replace your content creators. You treat users as smart enough to assess every webpage you send them to but too dumb to assess the outputs of emergent LLMs. Both are text on a screen.
Refusing to serve juicy steak because babies can't chew them or because there is 20 years of dried beef jerky in reserve to sell first.
Then don't click the AI summary button? Its not required. Kagi specifically says their search will always work without the AI features, and will always work without javascript.
As an early adopter doing 1200 searches a month, this is a good change. I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota.
As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend.
Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better.
I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.
Well on my side I've been quite happy with their summarizer tool. It doesn't mess with my query, but saves time when I want an overview of some long content or video.
This is cool, even though I haven’t managed to use the monthly 1k searches from the early adopter plan yet.
I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.
Time to take them for a spin I guess. I'm done with Google not respecting my queries. 2 words. I want them both on the page. If I want synonyms I'll type the synonym.
It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...
Oh wow, that’s a lot. For me, it brings the Professional and Duo plans into the sweet spot (I usually have over 700 but less than 900 searches). I’m not really using the AI features, so for now I’ll stay with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features), but it’s good to know it’s an option now.
I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)
I ran over a 1000 searches as an early adopter last month and this is a welcome change. I also notice how often I search for the same thing over and over, or use product name searches using Kagi as a gateway. I think this shows how poor my learning comprehension / documenting habits are. Thanks for bumping up the limits, though.
I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?
What makes a great difference is search quality is blocking sites you don't like/don't want to see. This propagates across all types of results (eg images/news too)
I use lenses for specialised searches (I have one for HN/Reddit) ND recipes (to avoid spammy sites). My favorite lenses are "non-commercial" (to surface results from the non-commercial part of the web) and "forums" (usually similar thing but focusing on human comments).
Now I find that I rely heavily on the firefox smart bar to go to pages I've been to before, as well as rely on "bangs" more, which don't count toward the searches.
Oh, what a nice coincidence! I signed up for Kagi Standard last month and today I hit my 200 search limit this morning. 300 searches will be plenty for a month's use.
Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.
"Dumb" things are going away. Wanted to buy a small speaker recently. Almost every model is riddled with: 1) Smart assistans 2) Manufacturer app (with treble/bass/eq controls locked in app).
Same things with TV and many more home appliances.
We are expected to pay extra to finance data collection ops on ourselves and be happy for the priviledge.
My problem isn't that I have to filter, but the remaining part is pretty much useless.
Google is worse every day. Bing isn't getting any better either. DDG is of course Bing, with extra filters. Yandex is.. well... for some very niche searches it's actually nice, as long as it's a topic Russians don't care about. But they display a captcha every 2nd click. Marginalia goes only for niche sites, which is great if you are looking for that. But it avoids mainstream. Have been playing with Mojeek recently, but it seems to lack a bunch of websites also.
Personally I'm considering running my personal Marginalia (at least it's open source), with my own sitefilter. But still just considering.
I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again.
I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus.
Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode.
Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?
Does it matter? You're talking about less than 2 cents. We all have a finite time, do you want to spend your days worrying about a few cents? The energy and time you spend on that could make you at least 4 cents or even more if put to other purposes.
Kagi already does this, performing the same search multiple time’s doesn’t count against you (from my testing), so they must be caching, or your browser does, not sure.
Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)
I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).
Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.