Comment by tombert

I don't know that I agree with all these complaints.

Making a bunch of free shirts is something DuckDuckGo did too, I have one. Is it a bit weird they incorporated their own factory for it? Yeah, but I guess I just figured that that was part of their marketing budget. How many cool products have we seen die just because their marketing was crappier than their competitors?

I do think that building their own browser is a waste of resources, but I think that the AI tools also are kind of marketing. People utilizing the universal summarizer gets the name out there, and allows people to see the Kagi branding more frequently. Are they spreading themselves too thin? Maybe, but simultaneously I do feel like the second that someone has to reach for Google to do anything, that's going to whittle away at their potential market share. I think the fear is that people are going to say "if I have to do X using Google anyway, why should I stick with Kagi, especially since Google is free?"

It's tough to say, I've been a paying Kagi user for about a year, I like it, it's a product that I actually think is better than vanilla Google. I really want them to succeed, so maybe I'm viewing what they are doing with rose-colored glasses, but most of the complaints in this blog post didn't seem completely horrible to me.