It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)
Right now you're charging nearly as much as something like Netflix, so your product has to be nearly a Netflix' worth's more value than DuckDuckGo (rather than Google as it's closer to your value proposition) for me to rationally justify the price.
One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure.
I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product.
Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0.
If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing.
In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).
Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow.
I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.
Is it that you're doing a large amount of compute per search which yields better results but higher cost per search?
On premise search. Businesses have lots of resources on their internal websites, but no easy way to search them in one place. Addition of role based search, when I'm logged and search only shows me resources I have access to.
$10 a month is less than one lost hour of work.
I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me.
The results are in another league compared to what I get elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys really think I don't know what I am doing?
Google probably works better for illiterate people these days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is rather patronizing at this point.
This is a pretty feeble argument for something, especially for a product where the user perception is that it should be free, and there exist multiple free options already.
While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a different way of looking at that is that for most people there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing needs to be worth 1/160th of their life.
It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of things that are of obvious value, but when they start adding up in your life for basic things, people will question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most people, search just isn't worth that much to them when there are so many good free options.
You should still use the website's search function first. Github issues/SO search often turns up results that google will ignore.
Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage option which always felt like they could pull the rug under you any day.
It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that threshold.
I think I wrote something like "if a product requires a subscription I don't consider it unless it replaces another subscription - or is so good that it is obviously worth it".
Well, for me this is the second category: For me Kagi is a fantastic deal at $10 (although I hesitate to say it since it probably means they'll end up charging more ;-)
For me there is absolutely no difference in paying $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine and I’m letting everyone know this to establish dominance over OP.
In other words, shave off a year of your career at least and retire instead.
$5 tea or coffee is just flavored water that I can make at home for 50 cents and minimal effort.
Obviously, to each their own, but $5 tea was a bad example.
And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad blockers are free.
Even if Google was completely free and didn't track me and didn't insult me with their ad matching, paying $10 a month for results that are in another league is fine with me.
Still, $5 for a cup of tea is a really terrible example because it's an incredible waste – tea is very easy to make. Technically, when you buy some tea somewhere else you're wasting time rather than saving it, since an electric kettle is much faster.
A mildly better example: at least when you pay $5 for a Starbucks nitro cold brew, you're getting something that isn't realistically available at home (unless you want to buy/clean/store/operate a nitrogen coffee kegerator).
$10/month for a search engine...I mean, you can just block ads and trackers for free. Microsoft literally pays you money to use their search engine. It's not like streaming services where paying for ad removal saves you time.
What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher")
That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage.
In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to what password managers charge.
This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs less than $1.50 a month.