Comment by SadTrombone
14 hours ago
Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.
Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.
So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?
In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
This is such a wonderful website
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp
This is the broadband page.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...
I think I’m on the upper end of what’s normal in U.S. but also not super abnormal either —
1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.
2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.
3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.
People not from North America and Western Europe exist.
It's nothing until you have to buy a $10/m subscription for every basic thing you do, then it adds up.
All of your examples are things many people are no longer doing because they can't afford them.
People are no longer buying internet to use google, nor buying gas for cars? The others I understand, I'm cutting back on them too.
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$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.
Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.
I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.
I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.
I do the same thing, I only use Kagi when the result I want isn’t obvious, so the cheap plan is plenty. It’s easy to do with the browser’s shortcuts.
AFAIK using the bangs (e.g. !g) do not consume your search quota, so you can do it via that as well.
This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.
I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough
Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:
Jul 2026 939
Jun 2026 1,317
May 2026 1,924
Apr 2026 2,537
Mar 2026 2,183
Feb 2026 2,038
Jan 2026 2,392
Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't.
Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?
Instead I just cancelled.
It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.
I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.
Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O
But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.
That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.
Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.
If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.