Comment by reddalo
9 months ago
The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with no free tier.
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
> that's also a big problem for their growth
I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.
Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.
Regarding ad margins:
If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).
If they can keep is sustainable and profitable without eat-the-world "growth", that's not a bad thing.
There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.
The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.
> that's also a big problem for their growth.
Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.
They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.
> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
>> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.
With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.
Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.
[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]
To be fair though, I don't rent my physical tools. I don't pay £20pcm for access to a quality drill or whatever, I just bought it once.
I'm not saying that should be Kagi's model, obviously it does have marginal costs for my usage that Makita doesn't, I'm just saying the analogy doesn't really hold up I suppose.
I think I'd probably prefer usage based pricing, but I know a lot of people here at least would complain that it gave Kagi an inverse incentive to build a good (at finding information quickly and easily) search engine.
> a big problem for their growth
But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.
No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.
But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn success. It's only within tech, where valuations and evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world, that people think of that as a failure of ambition or execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental models.
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I didn't think I would. Then I tried it. Then I paid for the cheapest option because I really liked it. Then I paid for unlimited plan because I can't go back to crappy search after I tried the non-crappy one. And, thinking about it, why not pay for a good service? It costs less than cofee+pastry per month, and it improves the quality of my life. I think it makes sense. Some people may disagree, but as long as the service itself works, why would I care?
I know very few people who would pay for a search engine
If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.
We just haven’t reached that point yet
I wouldn’t have paid for ad-free YouTube until the alternative became unbearable. So too with lousy search results.
I use kagi for better results few times a week and it’s always free.
That’s honestly their loss. As long as Kagi can sustain itself with its paying members then it can silently retain and grow its users forever.
Problem? No.
It’s a feature.