[HN Gopher] Fair Pricing
___________________________________________________________________
Fair Pricing
Author : CleverLikeAnOx
Score : 1022 points
Date : 2025-02-05 05:50 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kagi.com)
| efitz wrote:
| Kudos for adopting a user friendly billing policy.
|
| I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits
| automatic renewal billing if the service hasn't been used for
| some time.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| how would that be enforced?
| moooo99 wrote:
| Fines
| scott_w wrote:
| European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws
| and they get enforced all the time. There's a few ways:
|
| - Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection
| organisation complaints)
|
| - Proactively investigate and check
|
| - Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the
| regulations e.g. test results
|
| I'm sure there's other ways and you can do one or more of
| these things to ensure compliance. It's really context
| dependent on which methods one would use.
| larusso wrote:
| Also helps to scare with huge fines set up for the likes of
| Google and Facebook which any normal company can't pay in
| their wildest dreams.
| scott_w wrote:
| Yes, however fines don't mean anything without
| enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject
| about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the
| FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they
| knew an individual couldn't afford to sue over every
| single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth
| absolutely could do this.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Common sense should tell you that the amount a company
| like Google or Meta are fined is a lot higher than a
| "normal company"
| Propelloni wrote:
| It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism
| that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed
| sum, whichever is higher.
|
| For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
|
| > Infringements of the following provisions shall, in
| accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative
| fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an
| undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual
| turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is
| higher [...]
|
| (An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity
| that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its
| legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
|
| EDIT: formatting
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Yes, exactly. So those "huge fines" won't really scare a
| normal company since it would not apply to them
| Propelloni wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean? I get the sense of
| sarcasm, but I'm not sure. 4 % of annual turnover [1] or
| 20 Mio, whatever is higher, appears substantial to me. If
| Alphabet would have been fined once in 2024 it would have
| to pay 4 % of its annual turnover of the year 2023, 307
| billion US$, which amounts to ca. 12.3 billion US$. Or do
| you think 4 % is not enough?
|
| Recital 37 [2] of the GDPR gives a definition of what an
| undertaking means in the context of the GDPR.
|
| [1] https://www.munich-business-school.de/en/l/business-
| studies-...
|
| [2] https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-37/
| tuhriel wrote:
| not the one who asked the questions, but I actually think
| 4% are not enough.
|
| If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that
| shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6%
| margin over - not doing it.
|
| IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying
| back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more
| executives should go to jail for it - And that's the
| C-Level Executives, because it's them which are
| accountable.
|
| Problem with those things: usually it still hits the
| little ones harder than the big players...
| efitz wrote:
| US law has the concept of "civil contempt" to address
| willful lawbreaking of this sort. At that point
| executives risk jail time.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime
| Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so
| it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered,
| and (relevantly) when I didn't.
|
| This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to
| charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to
| collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I
| attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no
| Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my
| contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I
| didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already
| left my old city. They also surely had electronic records
| confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness
| since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I _had_
| set foot in one since that time.
|
| That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but
| send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure
| to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of
| me. If anything they owed _me_ money, not the other way
| around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my
| credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a
| badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
|
| ...anyway, that 'd be the way to enforce it: by checking
| access logs to see if the customer actually used the service.
| Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying:
| customer's always right.
| troupo wrote:
| > they refused to let me cancel my contract early without
| me showing them my new lease
|
| They problem is the cancellation process, not "they
| shouldn't charge me if I'm not using it".
| yellowapple wrote:
| Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were
| prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it
| (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to
| cancel).
| troupo wrote:
| > that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited
| from charging me for months I didn't use it
|
| No, the problem would be moot if the cancellation process
| was as easy as the sign up process. And I think the US
| _finally_ got that law
| yellowapple wrote:
| Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel, the prohibition
| on charging me for the months I didn't use it would've
| made this a non-issue. Hell, I'd probably still be a
| customer today, now that I've long ago moved back to a
| city with Anytime Fitness locations.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| You're in Australia?
|
| If anything like that happens again, or something like you
| purchase a second hand car but weren't supplied the signed
| registration paper / no receipt... need a day off work due
| to illness but don't want to pay to see a doctor /
| telehealth etc etc
|
| You can statutory declaration, a written statement you
| declare to be true, many professionals can witness them,
| teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who's
| practice requires they be a member of a professional
| organisation.
|
| If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before
| you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to
| them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to
| cancel from the date they were served or the date you state
| in the declaration.
|
| A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can
| in person, or registered mail to head office.
|
| This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by
| private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable
| offer for the time you were parked there--eg ten minutes
| prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as
| a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee--
| though these all tend to be electronically gated these days
| so mostly moot.
|
| I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil
| disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite
| enjoyable arguing my point knowing I'll typically win the
| argument.
|
| Yours truely, Mr Middle Age Curmudgeon
| yellowapple wrote:
| > You're in Australia?
|
| Negatory. USA.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| The Anytime Fitness is everywhere
| ykonstant wrote:
| Like chlamydia.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The
| service provider messages me two times prior to renewal,
| something like three days before and the day before. The SMS
| contain details of how to change my payment settings, which
| is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank
| account details.
|
| We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic
| devices and household appliances, everything really, except
| things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable
| lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to
| five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want
| that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at
| least ten.
| prawn wrote:
| Especially if there was an expectation that someone might
| forget to use a service and then expect all their data to
| have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?
| camhart wrote:
| You're assuming there is no cost to the business when the
| service isn't actively being used. Thats not always the case.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Could you just give the option for them to delete the account
| if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn't want
| to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then
| they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services
| were you thinking of there?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just
| wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more
| money.
|
| Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work
| like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them
| to be there if I do need them.
| Maken wrote:
| That seems unlikely, since soon there will be no FTC policies
| at all.
| siddharthgoel88 wrote:
| This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this
| notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that
| I understood it correctly.
| haxton wrote:
| Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a
| loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at
| Amazon haven't killed it yet.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| You mean kindle unlimited? That's the only monthly subscription
| they have?
| denkmoon wrote:
| That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi.
| Completely indispensable.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default
| browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the
| limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration
| your searches
| vincnetas wrote:
| Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable? Just
| subscribed, and looking around.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?_
|
| The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The
| papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.
|
| Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby
| AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little
| more skill and better citations.
|
| Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot
| that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun
| again.
| greatgib wrote:
| For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing
| a search and getting straight and instantly the results that
| I need, without crap.
|
| Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to
| give higher priority to some websites like python org.
|
| When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and
| stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and
| unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition
| often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal
| websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module
| documentation, the official doc is the best but there would
| be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear
| first.
| lolc wrote:
| Not having to think when I search is the selling point.
| lostlogin wrote:
| In no particular order: Pinning results. Blocking Pinterest,
| the top few results aren't spam. They are interesting.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it
| would just give you the result you needed in the first 3
| results? Yeah, kagi does that.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Up-ranking, down-ranking, and straight up blocking sites is a
| big one for me. No more scrolling past w3schools or
| geeksforgeeks for this guy!
|
| Also, it's built in that sites with a ton of ads are down-
| ranked.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I don't use Kagi anymore but the main thing I miss is the
| absence of "Popular products" which is completely useless and
| comes up far too often when using Google to find retail
| products and black listing websites from the search results.
| Outside of that, the results were largely similar.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Quality search results while not making myself a google user.
| De-googling is quite important to me. Besides that, basically
| what everyone else said; it upranks or downranks domains
| based on my settings, the claude AI answers are pretty good,
| and the no bullshit interface.
| burkaman wrote:
| No ads, no forced "AI summary", doesn't sell my data to
| anyone. There are many other quality of life features, I
| don't consider any of them personally indispensable except
| for the ability to permanently remove a site from results,
| which I have used a few times.
|
| I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly
| compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've
| never had any reason to try something else since I've started
| using it.
|
| Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot
| that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is
| not the only search engine with this feature though.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Let's be real, this lets them have a free PR win without having
| to actually give up anything at all.
| AdamN wrote:
| It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just
| see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi
| because I see the token in the request url.
| junon wrote:
| Well I guess it's finally time to try Kagi then.
| rettichschnidi wrote:
| Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Could be problematic since Kagi keeps paying Yandex/Russia and
| there's sanctions you know...
| ilvez wrote:
| I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi
| without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi
| using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could
| convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to
| Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.
|
| Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about
| it anymore.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| Yandex is a godsend to get information behind the silicon
| curtain.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Google too.
|
| Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But
| those are not going to be available for long since Runet is
| slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| No, even content hosted on YouTube. Some videos are
| almost impossible to search for even if they are linkable
| via YouTube. For instance, it's almost impossible to find
| the video of MSNBC hosts saying they will vote for Trump
| if Sanders becomes the Dem candidate. First result in
| Yandex. Both are vehicles for state propaganda obviously.
| SllX wrote:
| I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them
| overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In
| particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the
| Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium,
| certainly not Electron, but _WebKit_ ) but supports both
| Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps,
| and has _zero_ telemetry baked in and doesn 't try to upsell
| you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase
| by Mozilla even at the time it was made.
|
| Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat
| that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a
| possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit;
| and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly
| good for them if that happens.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use
| it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.
| _kidlike wrote:
| The 10$ plan doesn't have a limit anymore!
| zaptrem wrote:
| This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a
| rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour
| where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for
| especially crazy hours or something).
| annexrichmond wrote:
| yeah that's interesting. $5 for 35/day could be better as
| well
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a
| dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything
| because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result
| is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one
| attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find
| but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct
| result.
|
| So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's
| search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if
| they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're
| anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since
| you pay them.
|
| But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to
| shield from sus sites.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous
| with Kagi since you pay them.
|
| The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The
| amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire
| business model is to know who you are.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily
| user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but
| I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.
| z64 wrote:
| Always happy to hear people finding us through HMS! It's a
| fantastic community, and the Handmade ethos resonates deeply
| with a lot of us on the team.
|
| Thank you for your support.
|
| - Zac
| vincnetas wrote:
| Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach
| for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so
| rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything,
| and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till
| end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch
| anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has
| implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im
| subscribing just to vote with my wallet.
|
| Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are
| small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for
| service and does not use it.
| beAbU wrote:
| Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any
| streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed
| but don't consume everything for that month. Their business
| model relies on this.
| aimazon wrote:
| I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people
| notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix
| subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make
| if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to
| pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of
| wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how
| many normal people juggle different subscriptions by
| cancelling/subscribing each month.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look
| to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone
| was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to
| lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up
| with demand.
|
| If Netflix wasn't relying on a degree of inactivity with in
| their infrastructure then they wouldn't have needed to
| lower the bit rates.
|
| It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning
| is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite
| resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for
| decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth
| than is available if every household within a local radius
| was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers
| this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the
| total available on the host.
|
| The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes
| noticeable under "normal spikes" -- and I think we can all
| agree that COVID was anything but normal.
| jaza wrote:
| I have personally met people who, like me, really don't
| have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my
| surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the
| streaming services every month, whether I use them or not,
| there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe".
| So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's
| not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often
| not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how
| many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege
| of set and forget, rather than having to think about one
| more thing on a regular basis.
| import wrote:
| You're the main income source for the Netflix :)
| larusso wrote:
| Isn't this the classic gym subscription example? How many
| people have a subscription and actually don't use it. There is
| an episode of Friends about that.
|
| About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car
| lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
| vasco wrote:
| I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue
| is dormant "gym" accounts by now.
| quser1 wrote:
| that's called car rentals :)
| larusso wrote:
| Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand
| the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around
| whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake
| and have it :)
|
| I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street
| for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I
| assume it's not in their interest).
| BossingAround wrote:
| With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so
| excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-
| in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of
| the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.
|
| When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for
| renting is not available long term because people plan for
| the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have
| big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
|
| When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly
| needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc.,
| that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then
| 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
|
| In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it
| sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on
| trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely
| loving it.
|
| [0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life,
| but it's nice to have sometimes
| vasco wrote:
| I live the rental only life and only when needed. That
| being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be
| cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't
| depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is
| getting something that is already old and with a lot of
| mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+
| miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car
| doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if
| you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch
| every few years and you can even sell them for higher
| than you got them in years where the second hand market
| moves up.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and
| cancellations incredibly difficult.
|
| The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their
| members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't
| have enough space. The active members get their membership
| effectively subsidized by people who don't use their
| memberships.
|
| Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month
| of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February
| are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep
| their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should
| have more than they actually desire to use them. So many
| people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't
| committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time
| to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym
| membership because they think they _should_ use it but then
| don 't make the time.
|
| Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just
| stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel
| when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but
| they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to
| cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or
| twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
|
| And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a
| huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming
| service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content
| catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so
| I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And
| with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get
| to serve more ads and make even more money.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and
| cancellations incredibly difficult.
|
| I think that depends on your country. I've never had an
| issue cancelling my gym membership.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| In Europe it's law to make cancellations as easy as
| signing up. Also using the same methods; so if you can
| sign up through the web it's not allowed to only offer
| cancellation by registered mail that must arrive on a
| full moon only.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It seems insane to me that this isnt the law everywhere.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It is more insane to me that we _need_ a law for this.
| tedsanders wrote:
| 5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive
| accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical
| thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter
| window than 1 year of no activity.)
|
| https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...
| BossingAround wrote:
| To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about
| this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0
| activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be
| required to ask them whether they want to continue using your
| service (and no answer should result in service
| cancellation).
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to
| raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this
| automatic churn.
|
| I would wager that most people who aren't watching their
| bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used
| their Netflix account in a year aren't very price
| sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed
| preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers
| the service cost for everyone else who does actually use
| it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to
| their plight, from a welfare angle.
|
| The business model you're actually looking for is a
| utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API
| endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A
| subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all
| that, because our brains like nice round predicable
| numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but
| most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the
| time.
| stavros wrote:
| I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're
| rich" is a convincing argument.
| jaza wrote:
| Robin Hood and his Merry Men would beg to differ.
| zorked wrote:
| > The immediate second order effect of such a law would
| be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account
| for this automatic churn.
|
| That's fine.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who
| would have to cancel because prices rose from 14EUR to
| 16EUR. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass
| such a law, despite how it first appears.
| everforward wrote:
| This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-
| friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to
| subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is
| just another word for people leaving when the costs
| exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely
| beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-
| hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or
| failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than
| the occasional service that has such obvious and
| widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I
| struggle to think of examples of those services, where
| neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I
| can think of a few that I paid for too long because
| cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including
| cancelling cards because it was easier).
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >[I]t's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to
| unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it
|
| You characterize my position exactly right. I only point
| out there are many options people might not use Netflix
| for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it.
|
| >Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions
|
| Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action.
| That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you
| legislate higher churn.
|
| >like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind
| users they're subscribed,
|
| Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription
| flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for
| the minority of users who care about that more than a
| lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further
| and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or
| will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you
| usually pay extra for these niceties, because
| agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the
| world.
|
| > I can think of a few that I paid for too long because
| cancelling was a pain in the ass
|
| Well, I sympathize, and I've sometimes paid for
| subscriptions I didn't end up using too, but such is
| life. We don't always make the most out of what we pay
| for. That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the
| majority of satisfied users of those things by causing
| their prices to go up using legislation, though.
| everforward wrote:
| > Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action.
| That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you
| legislate higher churn.
|
| Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly
| consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately
| seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5%
| of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers,
| I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.
|
| I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the
| service requires raising the price, but that's largely a
| distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered
| at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who
| didn't actually want to.
|
| > Allowing competitors to price in an easier
| unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across
| the board, for the minority of users who care about that
| more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go
| even further and offer this thing called a "money-back
| guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely.
| But again you usually pay extra for these niceties,
| because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in
| the world.
|
| That's just information asymmetry, which is again a
| market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how
| hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which
| unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at
| below-market rates propped up by people who don't
| actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this
| theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you
| must come to a physical location during extremely
| inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes
| to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid
| their service (for good reason).
|
| > That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the
| majority of satisfied users of those things by causing
| their prices to go up using legislation, though.
|
| The ratio is much closer than you're letting on.
| Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of
| subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm
| struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to
| pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially
| not how it's preferable to prop these services up with
| subscribers that don't want to use it.
|
| It also just generally encourages a cancerous business
| strategy of making things that consumers don't really
| want, and the business knows they don't want, but being
| able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother
| to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could
| be going to innovative products that people actually do
| want if they weren't being soaked up by useless
| subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue,
| making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince
| people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do
| subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think
| I would use.
| bombcar wrote:
| By that argument the most customer-friendly action would
| be to force everyone in the world to subscribe to
| Netflix.
| layer8 wrote:
| I disagree, because this would force all services to store
| the time of your last activity, even if they don't want to
| track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it
| would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an
| important account, or the service could just claim you
| didn't click the renewal button if for example they want to
| get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don't use a
| service you also don't generate ad impressions, or
| similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.
|
| How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see
| if there's anything unexpected? One normally should do that
| anyway.
| sureIy wrote:
| > How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement
|
| Mind-boggling to me that you'd even have to do that. I
| get instant notifications for all purchases, we're in
| 2025.
|
| Once they stole my number and 10 minutes later I had
| already contested the charge, blocked the card and
| requested a new one.
| squigz wrote:
| I feel like the vast, vast majority of businesses that
| are conducting monetary transactions with their customers
| are storing, at least, their last login time.
| andai wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my
| servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where
| it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was
| pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely
| sending me strange unmarked invoices for _something_ ) but
| it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I
| didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a
| law for this. Mind your business - used to be written on
| the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge
| without eating it, should I also demand my money back from
| the supermarket?
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this
| are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for
| service and does not use it.
|
| Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is
| obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without
| consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses
| like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with
| respect.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this,
| and without consumer protection laws.
| InfiniteTitan wrote:
| Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi
| doesn't bill you if you don't use the product that month.
| Do you understand those are not the same?
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.
|
| I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was
| quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was
| because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us
| for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay
| for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user,
| but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which
| is fair enough.
| mihaaly wrote:
| We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our
| precious free time on something better than browsing through
| the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find
| something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or
| less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being
| exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times
| there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway.
| Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being
| a black rectange decoration mostly)
|
| Kagi in the other hand is useful.
|
| Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their
| customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them
| around, not Kagi? : )
| vachina wrote:
| lol we've gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a
| movie model.
| kmacdough wrote:
| Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting
| until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and
| reality, it is pretty good.
| omega3 wrote:
| I do this for all services now, it requires more active
| management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it -
| both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most
| recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished
| quality, defaults to concise responses.
| Shorn wrote:
| No good. Not fair.
|
| I put money into the account, you bill me per search - pre-paid
| usage based billing is the only way this can ever be "fair".
| whs wrote:
| Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like
| associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never
| have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan
| (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.
|
| Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck
| later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| The time it took you to submit this comment was surely worth
| an awful lot of those $0.0166...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you bill me per search_
|
| This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting
| very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In
| between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible
| target market.
| freehorse wrote:
| Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access
| or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end
| to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.
| bux93 wrote:
| A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay
| anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z
| searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.
|
| I suspect this would also work great for streaming services,
| like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6
| platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another
| platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the
| door open for incidental users.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I trialed Kagi.
|
| I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to
| Google without being tracked.
|
| I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use
| Tor.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > gave me access to Google without being tracked
|
| Hint: you can use Google in private mode. And unless you block
| all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so
| Google knows what you read.
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| > unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still
| use analytics so Google knows what you read.
|
| That's like driving without light and seat belt. Should be
| very obvious to every HN reader, that a content (ad) blocker
| is the first thing you install
| z64 wrote:
| Heya, this is Zac from Kagi.
|
| We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own
| self-hosted Tor node[1].
|
| We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic
| (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do
| so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their
| support to improve this generally.
|
| Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the
| node though :) If you give it a try, let us know how it works
| for you.
|
| [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-
| tor...
| 0xbs0d wrote:
| I used to have issues with VPNs but it's been a long time
| ago. Works flawlessly now.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Good - looks like Kagi will be on the menu.
|
| Note that URL is 403, from Tor browser.
|
| Works fine from non-Tor.
|
| (I'm now experimenting with the Kagi hidden service.)
| manmal wrote:
| Ok that's it, I'll renew my account now. I've been using it two
| years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment
| processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn't miss
| it, but lately I haven't been happy with DDG and been reaching
| more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?
|
| I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet
| search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I
| just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated
| purposely in R1.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source,
| then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search
| engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate
| (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero
| use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.
| pbronez wrote:
| Kagi also has solid AI features.
|
| Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query
| results. By default it shows up automatically when it has
| high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it
| to show up by adding "?" to your query.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html
|
| If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add
| bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line
| research agent and "!code" is good and software development.
| Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current
| facts.
|
| Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how
| well different models perform. They occasionally swap out
| default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a
| specific model if you want.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html
| fhd2 wrote:
| OK you got me, gptel supports it, so I signed up :P Search
| result quality is awesome so far, gonna play around with
| their LLM stuff.
| nomilk wrote:
| I'd pay more for more search _results_ (as opposed to searches,
| which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found
| google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default
| setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using
| Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results
| has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a
| term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or
| seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search
| rankings.
|
| Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant.
| While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of
| the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to
| type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I
| prefer the latter).
|
| One other small downside is I slightly missed google's
| 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and
| summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results).
| WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a
| particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this,
| but I did, although it was very minor.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly
| and to be commended.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay
| only for what you use.
| manx wrote:
| Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are
| billed these days.
| raincole wrote:
| Because they don't want the users to feel stressful for using
| their product more.
|
| > LLM Apis...
|
| Yeah exactly, ChatGPT doesn't have this option for their web
| interface either, only for API. For the same reason.
| ciphix wrote:
| This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI
| products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out,
| yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such
| occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very
| practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to
| a usage-based charging model.
| barnabee wrote:
| Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open
| WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly
| around specific UI features).
|
| Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local
| llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI
| APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.
|
| [0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv`
| installed)
| dirkc wrote:
| This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a
| month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe
| they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not
| using it, they're not getting any value from it.
|
| So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription.
| You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user
| does return, you are one step further than you would be with a
| new subscription.
|
| Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill
| has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.
| fnord123 wrote:
| More importantly you can tell investors you have even more
| accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
| thih9 wrote:
| Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly
| email: "You didn't do any searches so we're giving you next
| month for free, here are all the cool things you could
| do:...".
| JimDabell wrote:
| You _can_ do that, but if they don't interact with your
| email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get
| worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets
| ignored.
| freehorse wrote:
| They send by default an email every month when the
| payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just
| send the same email and state that the payment amount is
| covered by the previous month. They have really good
| practices at that.
| fl0id wrote:
| tbh, these e-mails can also prompt unsubscribing. because
| then I actually remember that I am still subscribed to
| that thing.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Yet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen
| that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to
| charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I
| only ever see something like that with shipped goods
| where they might have to deal with a return +
| cancellation
| 7thaccount wrote:
| That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a
| little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute
| garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in
| order to find something that should be one of the first
| results. This may just be a better model.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Kagi is so much better. You should just try one of the
| lower tier subscriptions for a while and see what it's
| like.
|
| Just for warning, you'll still want to use Google as a
| backup for hyper local results, but generally the
| experience with Kagi is much better.
| pbronez wrote:
| > you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper
| local results
|
| And can do so by adding !g to a Kagi query, just like on
| DDG.
|
| You know, I once ordered takeout from the other side of
| the country because I had too much privacy on my search
| engine...
| magnusmundus wrote:
| That's funny. I'm curious now, do you live in a
| microstate, or an island? Or was it a case of an overly
| eager delivery platform?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| My favorite is that I've now had multiple services that
| don't warn you prior to renewing an annual subscription.
| ghaff wrote:
| People also forget that they're subscribed to something
| (or that they signed up for emails either explicitly or
| implicitly), so they just report to Google (or whoever)
| as spam. I'm sure that's why I get a lot of email (mostly
| in my Gmail Promotions or Updates tabs that are from
| companies that scanned me at some event or whatever or I
| ordered something from.
| eviks wrote:
| not unless said investors demand better metrics like _active_
| user count...
| lostlogin wrote:
| Once you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask
| for a definition of 'active'.
| mathw wrote:
| This is the point where you realise the investors were,
| like most times, a mistake.
|
| I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am
| kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need
| them.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Technically, they do
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149
|
| But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is
| "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as
| you're imagining
| dgacmu wrote:
| No need to really - users + revenue is enough to figure
| it out. And you want to see revenue anyway.
|
| (I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)
| comprev wrote:
| I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the
| streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a
| month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up
| flow neither required a valid payment on file or email
| validation. In fact there was an entire industry built
| around generating false throw-away accounts.
|
| The company used stats including non-paying users to
| demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we
| knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
| scott_w wrote:
| > More importantly you can tell investors you have even more
| accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
|
| I know you're being a little facetious but _it is actually a
| benefit._ Many companies have implemented subscription
| pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward
| good business: it 's easier to reactivate customers who lay
| dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and
| have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned
| you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they
| ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such
| data will never see the light of day in any marketing
| materials.
| AdamN wrote:
| A thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid
| active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms
| of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue
| in absolute terms.
|
| Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| And they don't usually ask for number of subscribers, but
| number of paid subscribers. Startups have played enough
| games with this that investors should be able to hone in
| on the right numbers.
| scott_w wrote:
| Correct, your churn would be artificially lowered, so
| you'd probably want to define a point where a "paused"
| subscription is effectively inactive and count that
| against churn.
|
| It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd
| have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take
| a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is
| paused.
|
| Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear,
| accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions
| to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors
| out of money ;-)
| vel0city wrote:
| I've had places offer to just not bill for a few months
| while still allowing full access or offer some steep
| discounts in the workflow for cancelling in attempt to
| reduce churn.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| If you ever dealt with the business side of SaaS you know
| how important churn is.
|
| Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers
| are expensive for many businesses to get, they have
| marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It
| makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because
| it's a cheaper way to boost your growth rate.
|
| If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on
| if those deals are just delaying inevitable churn or if
| they are actually winning back customers. Delaying churn
| is just a game of spending money to make your books look
| better for a quarter.
| scott_w wrote:
| Yes but it's also a chance to convince the customer that
| you're worth keeping around. Depending on your product,
| you might also have customers that dip in and out.
| Keeping them from churning, while sacrificing a little
| cash today, helps keep that customer from shopping around
| for alternatives, too.
| vel0city wrote:
| Also, in my experiences most of those services which
| offered free time or heavily discounted alternatives to
| cancelling tend to be things which have a pretty low cost
| per subscriber (e.g., news sites, simple applications,
| not much per-user storage).
| mercwear wrote:
| I agree with your statement but your general calculation
| of growth is off imho, it should be: Growth = (New
| Customers Acquisition + Install Base Growth) - Churn This
| also assumes that churn = Customers that leave completely
| and those that downgrade plans
|
| IB growth can fuel business growth, especially during
| times of low new customer acquisition and or high to
| moderate churn
| OskarS wrote:
| A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is
| that people forget they have them and keep paying for
| Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that
| never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi
| is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a
| consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.
| andai wrote:
| I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible
| subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin
| toss which one the website would send me to. I only found
| out because I canceled one of them, and then still got
| billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the
| double-sub period.
| boringg wrote:
| Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing
| rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And
| people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the
| company still makes the same momey.
| Jentifgq wrote:
| guess we'll have to switch back to ARPU now...
| Seb-C wrote:
| AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to
| any investor.
| abound wrote:
| Kagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users:
| https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
|
| Disclosure: I work at Kagi
| tigroferoce wrote:
| Then thank you for the service. I'm using Kagi since a
| few months and I love you guys!
| ajkjk wrote:
| more importantly it's kind to the users
|
| (historically not so important to companies in practice, but
| it sure _ought_ to be)
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > We have implemented this for the simple reason of being
| kind to our users.
|
| Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.
| mercwear wrote:
| This will come out in due diligence if the investor is not
| just throwing money at whatever moves.
| yreg wrote:
| If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot
| more of them.
| BossingAround wrote:
| If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty
| much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you
| essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for
| whatever you stream.
|
| Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand
| and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a
| rainy day.
| scott_w wrote:
| I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and
| something that a challenger service could possibly use
| (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues
| around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective,
| it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix,
| Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined
| to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly
| outgoings.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| There's a separate cash flow problem on doing this, a big
| chuck of the expected revenue comes from people that
| setup the subscription and forget about it
|
| I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout
| even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I
| contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but
| I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've
| unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially
| when playing random stuff with friends, there's something
| nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't
| need to care who has bought which game)
|
| On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two
| of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited
| runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the
| rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's an interesting point, because it gets to _when_
| streaming services ' content costs are paid.
|
| Are they upfront? Or do they pay per view royalties at
| the end of a streaming period? Or likely mix of both,
| varying by each piece of content terms?
|
| Hypothetically, if a streaming service structured most of
| their obligations in the form of post-view true-up's,
| they wouldn't have any problem doing this. And could make
| bank on the float between customer payment (first of
| month) and paying for their content (end of period).
| basch wrote:
| Pay for what you use streaming exists. I don't think it
| would work here. Paying a large sum and dividing it up by
| what you watch is basically back to cable tv, just with a
| little smarter more immediate billing -> analytics
| feedback for hollywood.
|
| A change I think is necessary for consumers however is
| deduplication of content payments. If you subscribe to
| multiple services, youre paying for a license to some
| content multiple times, sometimes many times.
|
| What I would like to see is more like Kagi Fair Pricing,
| a master payment account (like prime or movies anywhere)
| that has access to all your accounts, cross references
| where you are paying for a title multiple times, and
| offers a refund or credit.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| It's a _very_ slippery path towards per-watch pricing with
| "rent this episode for just $0.99"... and _that_ will be
| horrible.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| I wouldn't mind tbh, it's way better than ads and would
| keep me from watching bad content
| PcChip wrote:
| Why would you otherwise watch bad content?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why is that horrible?
| naniwaduni wrote:
| The problems with per-watch pricing most come down to
| requiring a conscious decision each time they use your
| service, when you'd prefer that they be indifferent at
| most margins so that they don't have to be regularly
| reminded that oh, yeah, the amount of money they're
| spending on this darn this thing actually varies with how
| they use it.
|
| Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:
|
| - the friction of the transaction itself, which you
| largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed
| to be billed on usage, and
|
| - metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide
| range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse
| quantization: think not "rent this episode for just
| $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just
| $9.99". But the extreme of this is what you actually see:
| one price for any usage of the service at all, which ...
| is a popular pricing model at consumer scales because it
| works?
| schnable wrote:
| You can do this now with all the On-demand stores. But it
| quickly becomes more economical to buy a bundle.
| samspot wrote:
| At the rate I watch, this would save me money.
| ogrisel wrote:
| Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.
| bandrami wrote:
| Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments
| per article for news services being just around the corner.
| What ever happened to that?
| Maakuth wrote:
| AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very
| stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to
| pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower
| than what the subscription model would pay.
| thayne wrote:
| A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction
| costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good
| for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an
| unsolveable problem, but there are significant network
| effects that would need to be overcome.
| elnasca wrote:
| When people are confronted with the actual cost, they
| tend to say no. With a subscription, their head tells
| them that for 10 EUR/$ they get an infinite number of
| articles.
| dotancohen wrote:
| No, they get the articles that _you_ provide. But if
| _you_ provide only 50% of the interesting articles, as
| does every other provider, then approaching the ability
| to access 100% of interesting articles get very
| expensive. Just getting to 90% of the articles would cost
| 40EUR/$. And pushing that to 99% will cost 70EUR/$.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| A ton of newspapers actually tried micropayments
| (something like 50c per article). Almost nobody was
| interested, consumers do not want micropayments.
|
| I believe instead that the future for textual content is
| mass syndication, just like it worked out for video
| content and audio content.
| bandrami wrote:
| God I fear the advent of Reportify and Poetify
| jaza wrote:
| I make the streaming services work like this already. I have
| neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on
| streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled
| all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on
| service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month,
| then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the
| thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch
| something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.
| criddell wrote:
| I do something similar and that's why I usually try to
| subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can
| start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes
| it costs a little more because the services have to pay
| Apple, but for me, it's worth it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Please tell me that you have at least a Bash script or
| Selenium workflow for this. It actually sounds like a fun
| project to abstract and make pluggable. It would probably
| require maintenance, though.
| samspot wrote:
| This would be my first use of AI agents. "AI, buy me 1
| month of PBS".
| kstrauser wrote:
| I do this when we have visiting relatives who would spend
| all day watching a particular cable news channel that gets
| them all riled up. Before they arrive, I subscribe to a
| different streaming service with a package that doesn't
| include that channel and put its icon front and center on
| our TV. I then immediately cancel it so it doesn't renew.
|
| Totally worth the $20 or whatever.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Then a particular show becomes a hit. And the company hasn't
| planned hardware for the spike in traffic because no one was
| using it before.
| guappa wrote:
| I hear torrent protocol scales rather well.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Basically you want per stream pricing.
| ant6n wrote:
| I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn't really that much better than
| Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once
| in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while
| just entering queries, and then the chance to find something
| better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might
| make more sense, especially if it's designed not to blow
| through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches
| were actually done.
|
| Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value
| relative to Google is pretty obvious.
| pfix wrote:
| From kagi.com:
|
| > No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful
| search.
|
| So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking
| and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi
| target audience.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I get better results.
|
| I block the shit (a user preference with some good easy
| options), I up rank my favourites and pin Wikipedia.
|
| I'm happily paying for a family plan.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going
| to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to
| my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about
| how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how
| ridiculuous this proposition is.
| gkbrk wrote:
| You think Kagi tracks you, to the risk of killing their
| business, but Google doesn't track you or collect data
| about your searches?
| sillyfluke wrote:
| yes I do think there is a important difference between
| google triangulating data, trading data with others and
| attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts
| without me _voluntarily_ giving them that information for
| free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class
| action suit about incognito mode. And I 'd rather sue
| Google than Kagi. Plus, like 23andme, when times are
| tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company
| in dire straits will do with my dafa.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The difference is the business model.
|
| _Today_ , Kagi has a negative incentive to even
| historically track user search data (if discovered, their
| business would be cooked). Consequently, it's very likely
| they're being honest and don't.
|
| Furthermore, they're building a sustainable business
| around subscription revenue.
|
| In the event any of the above changes, they still won't
| have any historical data to share.
|
| As opposed to Google, who keeps things in their vaults
| until the heat death of the universe.
|
| > _And I 'd rather sue Google than Kagi._
|
| Ha! You and what European data authority supporting you?
| Because that's the only way you'd have a chance of making
| headway.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| > _Today_ , Kagi has a negative incentive
|
| Thank you for agreeing with me. Why would I bother using
| a VC-backed search engine _today_ that forces me to login
| to use it routinely only to receive an email later
| saying, "An Update to our Terms of Service". And whose
| only way to convince me that they do not store my data is
| to tell me that I can "trust them." Even if I trusted
| _them_ , I wouldn't trust their investors or their random
| late stage C suits.
|
| >As opposed to Google
|
| Are you willfully ignoring what I wrote in bad faith?
| Google had to settle a class action law suit that forced
| them to delete "billions of user records" and still
| allowed them get sued for individual claims down the
| road. Use kagi to search for the winston strawn summary
| of the case.
|
| Here is an excercise: Open a three letter browser
| starting with the letter T, go to google.com and search
| for the life expectancy of ALS. Now close the browser.
|
| Now tell me what google can deduce about about the real-
| life ethbrl with certainty and how they came by that
| information.
| gkbrk wrote:
| Are you hitting "New Identity" in the Tor browser,
| removing all cookies/sessions and creating a new circuit
| for each search?
|
| In that case I guess there is not too much they can
| deduce aside from the type of device (desktop, mobile).
|
| But of course, if you make more search queries without
| hitting "New Identity", they can piece together a lot
| more than that, including exactly who you are with enough
| time between new identities.
|
| If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as
| well. There is even a Hidden Service for it [1], so you
| don't even need to hit the clear web at any point.
|
| If you're concerned about tying your credit card
| information to your searches, you can just use a prepaid
| debit card or crypto to pay [2].
|
| [1]: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn
| 3qgmgjd6...
|
| [2]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-
| methods.html
| sillyfluke wrote:
| >If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as
| well.
|
| I have to remind you we're talking about preventing Kagi
| or Google from tracking you. This suggestion makes no
| sense when you're forced to sign-in to Kagi to use it
| meaningfully as your default search engine anyway no
| matter where you're connecting from.
|
| Your first two paragraphs describe a use case that is way
| more convenient than your last paragraph, and most crypto
| wallets have most likely come into contact with exchanges
| that have the user's kyc data to begin with.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'm not sure you appreciate how small "billions of user
| records" is for Google.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Again, you seem to be missing the point here. Those
| "billions of user records" are the users who thought they
| were not being tracked by using incognito mode. All the
| other users who didn't care about being tracked one way
| or the other are irrelevant to the use case we're
| discussing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company
| whose core business product is tracking... makes you more
| comfortable you're not being tracked than an alternative
| with a subscription model?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > there is a important difference between google
| triangulating data, trading data with others and
| attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts
| without me voluntarily giving them that information for
| free.
|
| You've specified the difference. One company is actively
| trading your data as its core business, for profit. One
| isn't. I find your position baffling.
| Evil_Saint wrote:
| I straight up get better results than current Google.
| ant6n wrote:
| you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with
| Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to
| convince me that their better within the free searches (I
| have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them
| anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so
| their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.
| tacomagick wrote:
| People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd
| much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust
| something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open
| source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What happened is exactly what's supposed to happen: You
| tried the product and didn't like it, so you didn't
| purchase it.
|
| It's the same with test driving a car: If you don't like
| it, then don't buy it.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| You test drive a 2022 Camry and now you can't test drive
| the 2025 model?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why would you, if you extensively tested the 2022 model
| and considered it garbage?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search.
| Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.
|
| "Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a
| business. They spend all their time complaining and
| accusing, and then after some time they cancel their
| subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them
| awake all night.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a
| day with always relevant results while the GPTs always
| hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you
| search.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think the real value is a combination.
|
| Use LLM to sift through search results (including all the
| crap clickbait) and find the thing you're really looking
| for.
|
| A bit like perplexity does though I run it locally with
| OpenWebUI and SearXNG.
| evilduck wrote:
| I don't doubt you but this life experience is so far from
| my own I struggle to understand what you use that much
| search volume for. I maybe search for 4-5 things a day
| (based on my one stint paying for Kagi and their usage
| reporting and trying to use it everywhere, and this was
| before AI products were able to search on your behalf)
| which is what led me to cancel, I was usually not getting
| the paid plan value from it. A large amount of my searches
| today are often just fancy autocompletes for specific URLS
| on already known domains that I probably could have
| accessed without a search engine at all.
| LoganDark wrote:
| According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50
| times a day. Date (UTC) AI Tokens
| Searches Feb 5, 2025 0 64 Feb 4,
| 2025 0 43 Feb 3, 2025 0 19
| Feb 2, 2025 0 24 Feb 1, 2025 0 19
|
| They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number
| of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay
| for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting
| :)
| rckclmbr wrote:
| Similar stats for me. It's become an invaluable tool,
| sometimes I'll use another browser that's has Google as
| default and immediately notice how much worse it is -- all
| the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google
| was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better... with the benefit
| of more personalization
| LoganDark wrote:
| I just wish they weren't hobbled by Bing's index.
| mathw wrote:
| I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily
| than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites
| which take technical content from other sites and repost it
| for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit
| the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading
| if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.
|
| It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better
| for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their
| business model being "give good search results" rather than
| "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".
| frereubu wrote:
| My experience is completely different - I get much better
| results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the
| ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get
| any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also
| love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query
| and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the
| results. That's a great shortcut.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > And one of the things I really like is the ability to
| entirely block domains, so for example I never get any
| Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now
|
| Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist
| extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns
| to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.
|
| [1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pn
| cfbmia...
| Tostino wrote:
| Know of any good pre-built blocklist?
| hk__2 wrote:
| No, I've built mine from scratch and now I've ~450
| patterns in it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I prefer configuring that in the service itself so that
| it works the same on every device where I use it.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Yeah me too, you can export/import blocklists but it's
| cumbersome to have to do it every time between devices.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| I found it way better simply because you can blacklist
| garbage SEO'd sites.
| layer8 wrote:
| There are also browser extensions like uBlacklist that can
| be used to do this on Google search results.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| I'm not keen on browser extensions. If it does not work
| without extension, it does not work.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats
| because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search
| results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The
| ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds
| to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy
| that it exists.
|
| On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion
| does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its
| value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.
|
| As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google
| search is obvious, but not it's value.
| angoragoats wrote:
| > Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the
| value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
|
| What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not
| obvious to me.
| allan_s wrote:
| Is there a lot of feedback from companies that have switched to
| similar model ? (how much it improved churn, customer lifetime
| value etc.)
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| You are really underestimating how many users just forget they
| have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription
| based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at
| all.
| Lutger wrote:
| There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them
| against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their
| subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.
| RALaBarge wrote:
| That is what this effort is aimed at: sleezy status quo
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting
| to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a
| little bit like how insurance is priced.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| _Can_ is doing some heavy lifting. I mean, I'm not in the
| boardroom, but when was the last time a subscription got
| cheaper?
| indymike wrote:
| Forcing people to pay for something they are not using is a
| time bomb. This is a good thing and we should all be looking at
| how to do this.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Hey Google, I want my $2/month for 100GB subscription back. It
| had disappeared and only $20/month for 2TB plus subpar AI that
| I don't use remains.
| verdverm wrote:
| I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go / per API call / search pricing
| model... to something that if I use it just once, I pay full
| price for a month. Same rationale for AI in my IDE, I'm waiting
| for the pricing models to change
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| There are any number of plugins for all of the popular
| IDEs/text editors that let you use metered AI usage using an
| API key.
|
| For VS code compatible plugins checkout Cline/Roo or just
| search for AI in the extensions.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a $150 refund from pieter levels from his
| crappy ai interior site, didn't log in once.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| if the plans included the search API for personal use I would
| almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also
| they blocked my vpn's another big nono
| z64 wrote:
| We would like to eventually offer everyone an API credit
| stipend with their subscription. Our APIs should get plenty of
| love this year, so please stay tuned.
|
| > also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
|
| Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but
| have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do
| this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us
| a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to
| support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.
|
| Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is
| helpful for you.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click
| through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?
|
| Search = advertisements
| ajdude wrote:
| Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would
| do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.
|
| A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the
| $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300
| searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
|
| I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search,
| but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally
| wouldn't get pay per search.
|
| I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead
| of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
| SllX wrote:
| I remember when they initially announced their plans here a
| while back and that actually held me back from pulling the
| trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans.
| $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe
| giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted
| the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?"
| onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini,
| it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there
| if I do.
|
| But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for
| search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my
| default, I don't want to _feel_ penalized for my mistakes,
| and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite
| getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser
| redirect me to a search page instead, and if I 'm paying for
| Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
| neilv wrote:
| For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid
| using the service for the first time that month (and a little
| sinking feeling when you do)?
| dmos62 wrote:
| My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free
| each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for
| 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes
| the feeling by factor of 10.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| But then it becomes a question of where exactly draw the
| line? And if you're going to do that, why not just charge per
| search so that you're not wasting money on searches you
| aren't using? Now you just have metered billing.
|
| We've seen how that plays out with cloud computing: a few
| people wayyyy overpay and subsidise a lot of people on the
| free/cheap tiers
| ajdude wrote:
| Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this
| policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive
| search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no
| way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using
| this fantastic service.
|
| Keep up the good work guys!
| nmstoker wrote:
| I'm in exactly the same situation as you.
|
| I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites
| suppressed in search results!
| user3939382 wrote:
| My pitch to friends is that it's like Google used to be before
| they started adding all the crap to their results and ignoring
| your search terms.
|
| Really, it's even better than that given the full feature set.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will
| feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use
| said thing.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Really. In the case of Google it's even deeper for me. For
| some reason the ruination of their search engine feels like
| a betrayal for which Kagi's proliferation feels like
| justice.
| jorvi wrote:
| Absolutely seconded.
|
| What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality.
| For example, there have been complaints about including results
| from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide,
| or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is
| virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display
| the results because we are a search engine foremost".
|
| Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings >
| Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-
| translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey
| / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have
| it.
|
| You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and
| reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).
|
| Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking
| certain results (read: ads) more difficult.
|
| Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations: /*
| Hide pre-translated webpages. "sri-group" is main result,
| "__srgi" are sub results. You can append
| `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
| */ :is(div.__srgi, div.sri-
| group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) { display: none
| !important; }*
| ajdude wrote:
| That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when
| DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that
| point that I considered DDG compromised:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
|
| I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search
| results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a
| lifesaver when searching on mobile.
| yegg wrote:
| We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive
| to either since we've been banned in China since 2014.
| Here's my statement from back then:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324
| thoroughburro wrote:
| You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification
| for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you
| like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)
| yegg wrote:
| The chatter in search right now is related to AI-assisted
| answers, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with
| knowledge graph answers before that (which became the
| most prevalent search module on desktop), 0 from Bing.
| And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile
| -- local results -- 0 from Bing. We have hundreds of team
| members and millions of lines of code. We're constantly
| working on search.
|
| In terms of traditional web links, which year after year
| have become less and less of the search results page,
| yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way
| Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said
| publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and
| has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs
| upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a
| competitive index of web links. Only the biggest
| companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on
| crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies
| can not do it all themselves.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > The conversation about and innovation in the future of
| search right now is related to AI-assisted answers
|
| I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the
| traditional search. That's the differentiating feature.
| The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly
| hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.
|
| But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that
| works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.
| yegg wrote:
| AI-assisted answers are completely optional on
| DuckDuckGo.
|
| Also, I have no problem with Kagi -- we are actually
| investors in it. The more competition in the search
| market, the better.
| basch wrote:
| Kinda sad to read this.
|
| The future of search is search. The future of summaries
| is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way"
| moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the
| directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You
| should be able to search the web without needing to know
| to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let
| summary break search the way search broke directory.
|
| If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have
| a conversation with the search engine about how it got
| the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the
| conversation to build new filters to block the wrong
| results and surface the correct results. I then want to
| read the source.
|
| Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits
| scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke
| answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell
| it its mistake.
|
| The reason summaries are even attractive in the first
| place is because search itself is returning such garbage.
| The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The
| "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You
| should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)
| yegg wrote:
| I also like traditional results, which is how I got into
| this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the
| _conversation_ right now is about AI-assisted answers,
| and just revised to make that more clear what I referring
| to.
|
| In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part
| of the search results page. Where they should appear is
| actually an interesting question we are exploring right
| now, and are finding the placement is very query-
| dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should
| be customizable in any case.
|
| We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can
| provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid
| user-generated content in general as sources right now.
| And current customization can control how often they
| appear (including never).
| jorvi wrote:
| I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I
| actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does
| it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at
| the end of a query.
|
| One nit that I can see someone else already brought up,
| is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If
| it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate
| information, you need to juggle new searches until you
| get the answer you're looking for.
| 0x38B wrote:
| I did not know this about Kagi!
|
| I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In
| one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their
| translation service and that was that.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified
| by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in
| search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my
| own mind.
| beretguy wrote:
| > You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but
| that won't apply to devices that don't have it.
|
| On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and
| JS:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022
| neoromantique wrote:
| The problem is not showing stuff from Yandex, the problem is
| that by paying Kagi you Yandex by proxy and that is an
| absolute red line for many people.
| jagermo wrote:
| same here, I need the highest tier available :)
| oellegaard wrote:
| I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local
| stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which
| is of course not their fault.
| blurrybird wrote:
| How is them not supporting Safari not their fault?
| hotpocket777 wrote:
| On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines
| in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects
| requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| It really isn't that bad. Setup is really quick and I
| have not found cause to complain on mobile.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same. It's annoying that it's required, but once
| configured it works just as I'd expect.
| evanriley wrote:
| Safari has a set list of search engines, you cannot add to
| or remove from the list.
|
| They currently "support" safari currently by redirecting
| the searches that go to your chosen search engine to
| kagi.com with an extension.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| FWIW, Kagi makes a browser called Orion that comes with ad
| blocking packaged in and works exceptionally well.
| pietz wrote:
| It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I
| gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite
| a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I
| live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content
| but I never understood the hype of kagi.
| vinhcognito wrote:
| I honestly can't imagine Kagi being worse than Google. At
| minimum, Kagi lets me derank and ban domains I don't like.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and
| honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.
|
| If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can
| permanently ban it. I _think_ that Kagi aggregates this
| user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might
| be wrong.
| hylaride wrote:
| This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a
| backup (there are a handful of large websites that only
| allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular),
| but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest,
| and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Kagi doesn't insert lies into the search results.[0] If
| that's all it did better than Google, that alone would make
| it better.
|
| [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766725
| otter-in-a-suit wrote:
| It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a
| tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google
| if I need local results / Google Maps.
|
| What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results.
| I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI
| slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed
| promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam,
| Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't
| filter.
|
| fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the
| results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways),
| since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a
| quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
|
| Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as
| a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer
| and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive
| to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
| idamantium wrote:
| Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may
| not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number
| of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo
| for many of us.
|
| - Ranking results from specific websites has been well
| referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if
| something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those
| results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of
| medical information up and down based on reputability,
| basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
|
| - There are subtle indications for sites that have a high
| number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even
| click on those results.
|
| - AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply
| adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to
| get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to
| be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is
| great.
|
| - Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively
| minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking
| through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping
| for something and want those kinds of results, but this is
| rare.
|
| All of this makes for a much better experience of the
| internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well
| worth the $10 in my case.
|
| I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so
| you may be well served by using Google for German content in
| that case.
| ukd1 wrote:
| Ditto - I've been a paying user since June 22. I've basically
| used Google a handful of times since, and been disappointed
| each time. Well worth it.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I just wish the unlimited plan was $5 instead of $10
| gjm11 wrote:
| I too wish that the things I might spend money on were half
| the price.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I just mean that I've got a lot of subscriptions, and it
| would be psychologically easier to justify a $5/mo
| subscription over $10/mo for search.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| Same. Kagi has been a breath of fresh air after suffering years
| of enshittification with other search engines whom are much
| more interested in your clickstream than providing you with
| quality results.
|
| Good job Kagi et al!
| Lammy wrote:
| Same here. I don't often feel the need to shill for paid
| products but Kagi is _so good_ that I want to do everything I
| can to make sure it sticks around. It 's like air in the sense
| that it's easy to forget how much I need it until I suddenly
| don't have it lol
|
| I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read
| before about an extremely niche local history topic.
| idamantium wrote:
| Me, too!
|
| What I love most about this fair pricing is it makes it was
| more appealing to encourage my friends to give it a try. Thank
| you, Kagi!
| barnabee wrote:
| This is cool.
|
| It'd be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a
| Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month,
| too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that
| gesture.)
| llm_trw wrote:
| The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and
| the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane
| price.
|
| Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between
| 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space
| charge.
|
| AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to
| get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not
| 1,000,000 times better than the competition.
| freehorse wrote:
| I love kagi, but indeed I am a bit concerned of long term
| usefulness/sustainability of their model if they do not manage
| to reduce their search costs.
| llm_trw wrote:
| We are rapidly approaching the point where using an embedding
| model to run over the whole internet will be the best way to
| rank search results.
|
| At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend
| decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in
| analogue computers is today.
| nektro wrote:
| maybe don't search with an llm
| freediver wrote:
| Hi, the API is still work in progress. Expect many more
| features and lower price once we officialy launch it (next few
| months)
| Vexowsky wrote:
| tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is
| overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in
| milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still
| having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my
| subscription.
| icar wrote:
| I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language
| are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search
| engine good at it.
| sersi wrote:
| That's why I never ended up using ddg. On the other hand I find
| that kagi is decent enough when I search in French, not as good
| as English but still better than google.
| aacid wrote:
| this. I tried so many times to run away from google but I have
| to come back every time because all search engines are
| extremely anglo-centric (or maybe rather US centric) and really
| don't care about other localizations.
| dgellow wrote:
| German results are reasonable if I select Germany as a region
| cyberax wrote:
| Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was
| avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less
| problematic.
|
| That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness
| subscription.
| jeff_vader wrote:
| When most of services nowadays seem like a hostile
| subscription, this brings joy.
|
| edit: use of Yandex on the other hand.. yeah that's a no go for
| paid subscription.
| butterNaN wrote:
| They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible
| number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a
| lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at
| a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them
| from making that first search. For those people, the cost of
| their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!
| bugtodiffer wrote:
| Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and
| email on top of your search
| ykonstant wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Comments like this are not helpful for
| people outside of whichever loop you are in, and people in the
| loop already know what you are alluding to.
| wtmt wrote:
| I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out
| compared to most others who'd just take money even if the service
| is unused.
|
| I'm not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year
| prices for family duo and family are quite high for many
| geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able
| to provide affordable plans.
| sedatk wrote:
| The Ultimate tier comes with an AI assistant that has access to
| Claude 3.5, GPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and so forth. It basically
| comes down to almost free for me.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...
|
| I think it's a good balance between locking the user into your
| product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving
| service.
| wiether wrote:
| Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting
| credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a
| catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused
| credits are lost.
|
| A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription
| for 18 months before realizing what they lost.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for this, had no idea there's a credit limit.
|
| More annoying to me is that you have to use up your credits
| before cancelling your sub. If you have credits and you cancel
| your sub, you lose the credits.
| wiether wrote:
| Yeah, once I discovered that, I basically bought the first
| six audibooks in my wishlist with the credits I had left and
| cancelled the subscription
| gaazoh wrote:
| Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks
| interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually
| trying it out
|
| * I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-
| centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the
| internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy.
| Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but
| how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and
| definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the
| obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of
| actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for
| the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and
| that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more
| about your
|
| * I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups
| come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and
| switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't
| have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy
| actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires
| you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing
| your best I guess.
|
| * Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure
| out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell
| out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT
| is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be
| 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest
| idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California.
| Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as
| hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite
| large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates
| fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can
| work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do
| because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out
| will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What search engine do you use?
| gaazoh wrote:
| Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be
| marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies
| control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad
| actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim
| otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best
| user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do
| better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed
| sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing
| incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can
| be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good
| product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Mostly DDG
|
| Why do you trust what DDG says but not Kagi?
|
| > require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a
| pricing incomprehensible to most of the world
|
| https://kagi.com/pricing
|
| There is a free tier (no card required) and the billing is
| done per search. It's that simple.
| wiether wrote:
| User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every
| user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-
| defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users
| to keep their subscription going
|
| Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user
| feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they
| can bring to the company through ads/affiliations
|
| [0]: https://kagifeedback.org/
| Havoc wrote:
| The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind
| the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an
| alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible.
| Which can't really be said for google and friends
| jorams wrote:
| > I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know
| how much I actually to shell out
|
| You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it
| would be better to display that on the pricing page though.
|
| As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read
| privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and
| particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording
| to hide behind.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| To be fair, privacy policies are worthless. They could have a
| squeaky clean privacy policy and still collect data on you
| illegally. I did request a copy of all my data under the
| relevant consumer law for where I live, and it looked like
| they weren't collecting anything they shouldn't^. That's
| still not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.
|
| ^ They did still have a copy of all my old assistant threads,
| including deleted ones, but a mate who works there says that
| was just a bug with the system and should have been fixed.
| This was about a year ago.
| rkangel wrote:
| I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that
| Kagi was worth it to me.
|
| I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's
| pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old.
| Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about
| impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about
| nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done
| hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to
| newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.
|
| It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any
| adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to
| a FB post (I don't post often).
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > I don't trust the product's ability to stay around
|
| Why does it matter for a search engine? It's not a tool in
| which you store your data and need to be stable.
|
| You use it now, when it's available. If one day it stops being
| available, or stops being good, then you stop using it. Nothing
| lost compared to not having used it in the first place.
| jjice wrote:
| > I don't trust the product's ability to stay around.
|
| I also generally have this mindset, but I've come to think of
| it through the lens of me getting a better experience for a
| while and going back down to what I had before vs having never
| had that better experience.
|
| Before I paid for Kagi I worried "what if it's great and then
| they go under?" But then I'd just go back to Google and move
| on, having never had that better search experience. I guess
| it's kind of like "better to have loved and lost than never to
| have loved at all?" Except that quote seems a bit over dramatic
| for a search engine...
| padolsey wrote:
| It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-
| hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There
| are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank
| you - you've got a new signup :)
| pmkary wrote:
| Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.
| s_dev wrote:
| I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian
| search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a
| war.
| ranguna wrote:
| Sources?
| cuu508 wrote:
| https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-
| integratio...
| mbix77 wrote:
| Calling the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of hundreds
| of thousands people, targeting kindergartens, hospitals,
| normal civilians, destabilizing an entire continent -->
| "politics".
|
| "any search source we consider using goes through rigorous
| evaluation process that considers: result quality, API
| availability, economic viability, result latency, legal
| terms, privacy terms, and technical feasibility. the moment
| 'politics' is a part of factors being considered for search
| results, is the moment I stop working on a search engine."
| Novosell wrote:
| What else would you call it?
| mbix77 wrote:
| War, invasion, terrorism,... take your pick.
| Novosell wrote:
| Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi
| and google primarily operate, has never done anything
| repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties
| with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.
| mbix77 wrote:
| Yes, you're completely correct. Kagi seems to have a very
| good product, it would become better if it would become a
| "good" company. I do everything to not use any big-tech
| software and services. In search it seems the options are
| limited.
| Novosell wrote:
| Aye, the search situation is rather dire. I also try to
| distance myself from big-tech as much as possible, but it
| is rather difficult if you still wanna live a digital
| life. I don't feel like going full Richard Stallman,
| having to entirely avoid web browsers.
|
| Just gotta cut your losses at certain points and accept
| less-than-perfect-but-still-better solutions.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Classic whataboustism. If you don't want to use something
| because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.
| Novosell wrote:
| >If you don't want to use something because of the US's
| geo-political actions, go for it.
|
| Thanks for giving me permission, much appreciated. I
| needed that.
|
| Responding "classic whataboutism" isn't very productive,
| just kills the conversation and makes it impossible to
| point out potential hypocrisy. Classic reddit comment.
| geye1234 wrote:
| "War is politics with bloodshed. Politics is war without
| bloodshed."
|
| -- Clausewitz (I think?)
| mbix77 wrote:
| Comes from Mao, not surprisingly.
| id00 wrote:
| That's definitely an interesting hill to die on. I can say as a
| paid Kagi user and regular donator to VSU
| s_dev wrote:
| I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a EUR20
| euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or
| Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.
| vindex10 wrote:
| It's ZSU (Zbroini Sili Ukrayini) in Ukrainian
|
| https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B9.
| ..
| gspr wrote:
| Exactly. I've used the free tier a bit. I'd say it's never
| worse than Google, and sometimes significantly better. I'll
| happily pay a bit for this. But no way am I paying a single
| cent for anything where a significant part of what makes it
| work is Russian.
|
| Glory and liberty for Ukraine!
| Gareth321 wrote:
| We all have our red lines to draw. I personally use Kagi
| because it _doesn 't_ censor results from politically
| contentious sources like Yandex. Quite the opposite.
| cuu508 wrote:
| The problem, for me, is not censoring/not censoring sources
| like Yandex. The problem is them sharing profit with Yandex.
| tokai wrote:
| Ah I was just looking into trying a subscription. Can't see how
| supporting genocide financially is impartiality.
| piyuv wrote:
| Do you use any American tech companies? There's another war,
| FYI
| roenxi wrote:
| An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up
| search history with an account in the financial system which adds
| failures not present when using something like Google or
| DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually
| possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and
| disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto
| here that isn't obvious at first glance.
| frereubu wrote:
| > Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
|
| https://kagi.com/privacy
| roenxi wrote:
| Google: Don't be Evil. Although I'm having some trouble
| finding a reference on their website to back that up.
|
| If you're going to start trusting search engine companies
| then maybe don't have them linked to your bank account. They
| can put what they like in a policy document but the problem
| is what happens when they decide to start doing things
| differently.
| dizhn wrote:
| Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep
| your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi.
| I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this
| is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't
| want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)
| g_p wrote:
| You might find Privacy Pass of interest then -
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
|
| It should be out in the next day or so.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Ooh this is interesting. Theoretically these could still
| be associated with my account right? Since you need to
| use my session token to generate these privacy tokens. Is
| there a technical explainer somewhere with instructions
| for setting this up without a web extension?
|
| Edit: Looking into it, it seems like this uses the same
| mechanism for tokens as Cloudflare's turnstile system:
| https://privacypass.github.io/ or for the proper standard
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html
|
| Excerpt that explains how it works:
|
| > When an internet challenge is solved correctly by a
| user, Privacy Pass will generate a number of random
| nonces that will be used as tokens. These tokens will be
| cryptographically blinded and then sent to the challenge
| provider. If the solution is valid, the provider will
| sign the blinded tokens and return them to the client.
| Privacy Pass will unblind the tokens and store them for
| future use.
|
| So it seems like as long as the cryptography is done
| right and Kagi's webextension does what it says, they are
| actually private.
| dizhn wrote:
| Awesome. I didn't see much detail about how it works in
| the page. Something like this would be useful for other
| sites as well. Is this using an existing technology?
|
| (Firefox extension is not found. It's probably not in the
| store yet. Can't find with search either.)
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| Looks like they're implementing this, which is also used
| by Cloudflare Turnstile: https://privacypass.github.io/
|
| The standard has also been published as RFC9578:
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html
| freediver wrote:
| We didn't launch this yet. It is in testing which is why
| we published this doc for testers. Full blog post with
| complete run down of the tech and implementation coming
| (very) soon.
| leokennis wrote:
| I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited
| pricing.
|
| For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or
| stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium
| e-mail and a premium task manager.
|
| What makes web search so expensive?
| gkbrk wrote:
| How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is
| 43,200 minutes in a month?
|
| If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions
| of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month
| you can search 400 billion web pages.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's not that Kagi is expensive at all. It is that your
| streaming services and premium e-mail service are incredibly
| cheap. Can you name a few things which you can purchase in your
| local supermarket that brings you the same value for $10?
| neoromantique wrote:
| A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of
| money is going to Russia.
|
| No thank you.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange
| feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is
| "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying
| for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?
| dagurp wrote:
| I think you're talking about Choice-supportive bias.
|
| I don't know why you're throwing this out here without anything
| to support it.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| > Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi.
|
| It is paid service, what is the other option? People that don't
| use the service being happy with it?
|
| > because their brain wants to justify them paying for search
|
| It is search engine, not candy crush. No one wants to pay for
| searching, if they do it is because they find it useful. It is
| not their brain gets a shot of dopamine every time they do a
| search on it.
| reddalo wrote:
| I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four"
| describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their
| Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced
| products, so they must love them in order not to feel like
| "idiots".
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect
| making you think that the people on the other side of the fence
| are delusional.
|
| Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that
| search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the
| best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on
| the other side.
|
| The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...
| paulfharrison wrote:
| It could also be that the aspect of personality that causes
| people to think Kagi is better also causes those people to buy
| it.
| mbix77 wrote:
| I will never support the Russian invaders. I will happily
| subscribe to your service if you drop Yandex. Until then, hell
| no.
| cianmm wrote:
| Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I
| tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US
| focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and
| prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to
| include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain
| cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies
| in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd
| page.
|
| Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to
| Google.
| zorked wrote:
| You have to switch the country yourself. It does not get more
| local than country. Local searches are a weakness in Kagi, yes.
| rkangel wrote:
| I use it in England and I've had no problem with this at all.
|
| Out of curiosity I just tried the same search, and all the
| results I get are for .ie domains, so it looks to be working
| correctly.
| mjlee wrote:
| Yes, and there's a dropdown so you can easily pick a country
| other than the one you're in.
| eth0up wrote:
| Not anti Kagi, but..
|
| Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he
| enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration
| envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or
| investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know,
| but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy
| desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg
| boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never
| worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car
| won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores
| of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford
| it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side
| hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn
| conversations with the pariah professor.
|
| If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would
| expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the
| green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet.
| That hag is oppressing me, damn her!
|
| Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind
| he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and
| fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think
| again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to
| feel.
|
| "It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of
| an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being,
| gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was
| just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying
| antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he
| contracted from that robotic concubine store.
|
| He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning
| to dissolve and he knew it was time.
|
| An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting
| a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling
| index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it
| time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay
| Later!" it hissed.
|
| In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling
| faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the
| hovering being's pulsating third eye.
|
| And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again,
| with will and self definition.
|
| Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and
| his balls were screaming.
| zuzulo wrote:
| I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever
| had with a search engine.
| pointlessone wrote:
| Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A
| single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to
| forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage
| here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying
| accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| I love this - the world needs more of it.
|
| Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single
| biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to
| make an ethicals busines.
|
| This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical
| UX.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| They took a little investor money, then spent a big chunk of it
| on t-shirts lol: https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
| percevalve wrote:
| I haven't seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I'll
| bring it up here.
|
| A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of
| "customer inertia." It found that users tend to overestimate
| their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words,
| when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature),
| a significant portion of potential users will choose not to
| subscribe because they fear they won't be able to cancel if they
| stop using the service.
|
| According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So,
| could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier
| and increase new subscriptions by 30%?
| https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...
| benrutter wrote:
| That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on
| the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that
| look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be
| much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it
| looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some
| people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale
| enomics.
| percevalve wrote:
| Same here, hence why I remembered it (even if it is from
| 2022), it did resonate so much with my own experience.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did
| turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't
| want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that
| coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the
| shitter for it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Seeing how much revenue subscription services make from
| inactive customers (and how much I have paid over my lifetime
| to services I no longer used) people don't overestimate this at
| all. If anything, users still underestimate it.
|
| The disconnect between the researchers and people's actual
| estimations is that "cancelling a service" is much harder than
| the couple button clicks it usually takes. You have a
| structural problem: If you don't use a service, you don't spend
| a lot of time thinking about it. It's easy to cancel something
| if you make a conscious decision to stop using something. But
| if it just gradually falls out of use, your only reminder that
| you should cancel it are your bank statements or the occasional
| payment reminder email (that some services avoid sending for
| exactly this reason).
| percevalve wrote:
| Basically that is what this study went into great length to
| measure, at least the way I understand it.
| nosioptar wrote:
| As someone who often doesn't subscribe because I don't want to
| get NYTed into having to pick up the phone to cancel, no this
| approach to pricing wouldn't change things for me.
|
| What does work for me is when the service's docs have a very
| clear page on how to cancel the service without having to talk
| to someone.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Introducing Fair Pricing
|
| This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that
| previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you
| generally want to put in your customers' heads.
| p3rls wrote:
| What my mind went to, how could someone forget to use a search
| engine, especially one that is supposedly so much better than
| Google for a whole month?
| AiAi wrote:
| I guess... Still a positive thing that they are trying to make
| their product/service more "fair", and are progressing in a
| good direction?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, I mean it's a positive move, I suppose (though, if this
| is a _common_ thing, then they have other problems, because
| clearly the people involved aren't using it as a search
| engine), but it's a strange way to market it.
| whereismyacc wrote:
| I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds
| great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that
| websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low
| hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you
| Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be
| warded off.
| AiAi wrote:
| It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to
| make the service more accessible for developing countries.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| My impression is that pricing of kagi is already close to cost
| price (plus salaries).
|
| I think we are entering an era, where these things will just
| not be available to people in developing countries, as they
| cost more than they can pay. Especially taking Ai into
| consideration.
|
| However, we could start paying fair prices for produce like
| clothes.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform
| to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?
|
| I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend
| to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not
| adapting?
| z64 wrote:
| I would say there are three major factors:
|
| 1. We have a diverse set of upstream sources. It would require
| all of them to be "compromised" for our results to _completely_
| tank.
|
| 2. We have a "crawler-lite" that solely collects info on page
| quality - number of ads/trackers detected, page speed, etc. -
| and we take that into account when ranking the results,
| generally nudging them down the page if "cleaner" ones can be
| found.
|
| 3. Our sole source of income is our users, and we actively
| respond to impacts in search quality that our users submit to
| us on our feedback form. If they are not happy with the results
| quality, then we are out of business.
|
| Put simply: Our technology and business model is completely
| aligned to resist "enshittification". We have no reason to bias
| results or "sell out" to anyone.
|
| With the momentum we've gathered, we are also taking first
| steps to building our own full scale index[1], both as a
| valuable contribution to the ecosystem of search and a
| contingency to reduce our reliance on 3rd parties.
|
| [1]: Help us build it!
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html
| eitland wrote:
| Tangentially related:
|
| Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim
| the opposite.
|
| So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of:
| "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at
| something and worst at something else".
|
| So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even
| if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the
| original must have been about "every _input_ ".
|
| Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in
| Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for
| and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).
|
| So here are the results from Google:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...
|
| For me Google says: > No results found for "Every
| input is best at something ". > Results for Every input is
| best at something (without quotes):
|
| Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:
|
| https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...
|
| So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including
| unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective
| index than Google.
| KomoD wrote:
| I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd
| consider to be spam.
| eitland wrote:
| But they are there, and they are real, and they don't drown
| out any better results.
| KomoD wrote:
| I'd rather have no results than spam results.
| eitland wrote:
| Totally agree, this is my main complaint against Google.
|
| But IIRC all except one of the ones I got were actually
| relevant even if I had to tweak my query even more before
| I got better results.
| louthy wrote:
| I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!
| wongarsu wrote:
| Three now, one of them this thread.
|
| I'm not sure I'd agree the other two are spam. One of them is
| a plain-text transcript of some sharepoint files that
| mentions the quote and attributes them to the same person.
| The other is the same powerpoint, but in its original on some
| slide sharing website.
|
| In many cases, either would be a great result. Here it still
| gives us the direct quote and confirms that all the way back
| in 2013 somebody attributed it to the same guy. That's a
| great lead if you try to track down the origin of a quote. If
| you cared enough you could now contact the person who made
| the slides to track the quote further.
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| As I understand it, they aggregate and re-rank results from
| Google, Bing, Yandex, Brave, (more?), plus their own index.
| loehnsberg wrote:
| I don't understand why this is bad. Aggregation is a feature
| because it allows to be no worse than Google, in my
| experience likely better, and you pay for search with money
| and not with data.
| forty wrote:
| Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such
| thing but without AI stuff?
| louthy wrote:
| You can disable Kagi's AI answer feature in the settings. But,
| personally, I find it extremely effective. If I want an AI
| answer I put a '?' at the end of my query, if I don't use a '?'
| then I get a regular search engine set of results. Really
| simple UX.
|
| The AI answers all have references too.
| i5heu wrote:
| Looks like I am a kagi customer now.
|
| What a bold and genius move.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi
| ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers
| and love it! So this won't save me a dime (which is still totally
| cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered
| pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay
| for them but rarely, if ever, use them).
|
| I also _really_ like this model for subscription services in
| general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix
| (though really, I'm looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months
| when you don't use the service. It's the kind of thing that
| wouldn't be hard for companies to implement, and could
| potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like
| the EU or the CA state government.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Its good and they deserve credit for it. Let me be clear on
| that.
|
| Now, wouldnt it be even better to implement usage based pricing
| with a maximum that's equal to the current subscription?
|
| I dont know the Kagi details. Say you pay 10/month and each
| search is $0.02. You pay max(search_count * 0.02, 10).
|
| I guess the logic is much simpler for their current system.
| It's 10/month, period. Then if you didnt search anything you
| get a refund. Instead of tracking and calculating usage.
|
| However, usage pricing should be more enticing for casual
| users. With the statement refund for 0 use, there is now an
| incentive for infrequent users to NOT to use the product.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Another win for Kagi. Companies like Kagi, Valve win by just
| being nice. Can't stop winning.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Wow, awesome. If everybody did this I could stop charging my
| credit card number every 6 months.
| daft_pink wrote:
| It's nice that they are in a position that they can do this. I
| use Kagi every day.
| neves wrote:
| Does it mean that if someone dies they won't need to cancel the
| service?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| This actually makes me a lot more likely to sign up for Kagi!
| I've been hearing good things about it so I've been interested,
| but these days I'm very subscription-averse because there's just
| so dang many of them. But only paying for it if I actually use it
| makes signing up lower risk. (I know myself well enough to know
| that there's a good chance I forget to cancel otherwise.)
| edude03 wrote:
| I don't understand people who would use kagi (or any search
| engine) sparringly. If you're already willing to shell out money
| for a replacement, why wouldn't you use it all the time?
| a12k wrote:
| I am hyper aggressive about cutting monthly services. If I don't
| feel I am getting value, or can get the value from somewhere else
| with a little more work, I cut it. For example I would never,
| ever pay for YouTube Premium. This has led to a pretty
| disciplined set of monthly services and low cost. Kagi though is
| one of the most useful services I have and goes way above and
| beyond this bar, so keep it around.
|
| To ape someone else's lament: I can't take advantage of this
| because I use it daily.
| ajyey wrote:
| I use YouTube every day of my life and gladly pay premium. It
| costs money to host and serve the insane amount of video
| YouTube provides. To each his own
| zOneLetter wrote:
| Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so
| refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of
| nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.
| dax_ wrote:
| Uhm.. Kagi has plenty of AI features. :) To be fair, you can
| turn them off if you wish.
| maelito wrote:
| Still no revision of the Yandex partenership. Spending money on
| Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist
| state.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I would have purchased several services over the years if they
| had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they
| did not). In particular there was some video editing software for
| $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd
| have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my
| craw the months I didn't use it.
| tuhriel wrote:
| When the whole SaaS stuff started to pop up as buzzword I
| actually believed that it would work that way.
|
| You don't pay some heavy license fees for a local installation
| anymore, but get a login where you get billed a specific amount
| if you use it that day/week/month etc. I was pretty sad when I
| saw how it got implemented...
| linsomniac wrote:
| You're right, but the software I mention above was some
| locally-installed software with a SaaS-like pricing.
| tstocker wrote:
| What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused
| credit ?
| z64 wrote:
| It just uses Stripe credit under the hood. So as long as you
| still have an account registered with us (active subscription
| or not), you can use that credit to resubscribe any time - or
| use it on other things, like API credits, or gift codes.
| whalesalad wrote:
| this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is
| paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?
| wenbin wrote:
| It's great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.
|
| The first time I encountered this was with Slack--they only
| charge for active users.
|
| We follow a similar approach with our products : 1)
| PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the
| user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing
| users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass
| with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium
|
| Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they'll request for
| hourly fair pricing - don't charge me for those hours that i
| don't use your service!
| MrOxiMoron wrote:
| Can I get this on my Netflix, Disney+, whatever too pls?
| m_kos wrote:
| A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few
| translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a
| subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped
| using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute
| even more free translations.
|
| Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't
| pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to
| lose some of your goodwill.
| freediver wrote:
| We are definetely not emailing you, it could be the service we
| use to crowdsource translations (localazy). I suggest removing
| the account from there or check their settings? (as we do not
| have control over these emails)
| m_kos wrote:
| This is a very disappointing reply.
|
| Anyway, yes, they come from a service you are using with the
| subject line "[Kagi Search] There Are Some Untranslated
| Phrases." I know how to unsubscribe or reroute emails to my
| spam folder.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Every service provider should be obligated to do this. I'd bet
| there are tons of phone or Internet plans that have 0 usage
| chuckadams wrote:
| Just raising my hand as another who would sign up, but for that
| whole Yandex thing.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where
| I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual
| days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers
| going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?
| miki123211 wrote:
| Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.
|
| I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that
| would be added to my 100 free searches.
| jjice wrote:
| The thing I appreciate most about Kagi is their "Quick Answer"
| option. Suffixing a question mark on a query to give me a high
| quality, cited RAG (?) AI summary has been such a nice option for
| quick answers.
| paradox460 wrote:
| They say billing cycle, but what if I'm on the annual plan? Is my
| cycle a year? Or does my renewal date get pushed back a month if
| I don't use it?
|
| I use kagi hundreds of times a day, so it's not something likely
| to happen soon, but I'm still curious
| sizzle wrote:
| Someone please convince me to use Kagi. What makes it superior to
| Google for you?
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| A good chunk of inflation is just price gouging, in today's
| modern world.
|
| There are more tools to understand data and squeeze every penny
| from customers.
|
| It's admirable when a company isn't trying to bleed customers
| dry.
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