As founder of a 15 year micro consultancy I'm nodding along. We've chosen quite deliberately not to grow. I don't want staff or huge wads of cash, I don't want to be rich; I want a gentle, family focused, sustainable, comfortable life. Why grow and face all the stress of growing when I'm perfectly happy with things as they are?
Kagi: I use and pay for it and I love it. I'm very hopeful that they have made something excellent - each time I dip into Google with a !g (and it's becoming more and more rare!) I'm horrified by the clusterfuck it's now become. The clean, simple, accurate results of Kagi are fresh air and well worth paying for.
I've seen the founder say on many occasions that they're not aiming to be "a Google killer" and I'm glad. With scale comes inevitable enshittification. I just hope their business model is enough to support a thriving - but small - business.
Yes. That is the standard business model to follow. But I never reached that point because of my novice programming skills and the fact that this was a hobby project.
My intention was to make it free for individuals (search on desktop + personal cloud) but charge business users who would want shared access on a network. Any AI features would also be free if it runs locally or chargeable for Claude/GPT. I wanted to leverage Mac and Windows’ built-in AI/ML capabilities as much as possible. The OCR on both systems is actually really powerful! Even my ten year old Asus laptop was able to OCR PDFs and images very quickly and reliably.
Probably the thing you really want from an article with this topic focus is to be able to see the images bigger then a postage stamp size. And, even more irritating - the images are actually there, in reasonable size, just not linked...
I’m sorry to say my experience has been “Android = pain” as far as the oldies are concerned. Had years supporting MiL and her endless devices. Then two years ago we got her an iPad instead. Support requirement has dropped to pretty much nil.
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