Just 1% of Google's market might be enough to sustain a non-bloated, VC-free company and make a good product.

The Bloomberg Terminal is extremely expensive and yet companies pay for it because it makes their traders' jobs so much more efficient. I don't see why companies wouldn't do the same for a search engine that filters out all the bullshit so their employees don't have to waste their time wading through it.

You are right. And the actual number is lot smaller. We just need 0.001% of Google users to be sustainable with the current team size. (or about 50,000 users out of 4.3B Google users). And if you find 50k users, you will find 100k. First 5k is tricky!

(Kagi founder here)

I've been using Kagi for a month or two now. Love it and very excited about your work. Unlike alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, it has easily and painlessly replaced Google Search for me. Can't wait to see more from yall

Hi!

I'm a Kagi private beta tester and love it. Will become a paying customer.

One question: I do remember a page that told me how much I searched and what that would mean once Kagi becomes a paid service. I can't find that info anymore. In light of the mail us Kagi users got today, does that mean that it's going to be a flat rate for starters?

Yes that is what we intend to try ($10/mo flat fee for unlimited). Most users told us they are more comfortable with this model vs pay-per-use which is why we removed the "Consumption" page as is not relevant in this model.

We do not yet know if the flat fee will be viable for the company and we hope to learn that very soon.

Can you make Consumption page into History page? I think it handy to see all my old searches.

Another user here who see's huge value in just renaming the consumption page to a history page. Would be VERY handy! Especially if I could restrict a search to my own search history.

Hmm, we never had the ability to search your search history as we do not keep track of searches. Consumption page merely showed search count per day.

If you want to save your search history perhaps you can open a suggestion on https://kagifeedback.org

> Just 1% of Google's market

Google has 4.3B users, so 1% of that is 43M. With a $5 subscription, Kagi would have $215M in monthly revenue, enough to pay for 14,000 developer salaries.

A more reasonable target might be 500k users at, let's say, $10/mo.

If I had a nickel 1% of the time some naive dude said, "we only need to capture 1% of the market to become rich", I'd be very rich.

1% of people who use Google is a hell of a lot. Also, Bloomberg doesn’t just search, it also provides data

Categorized search results are also data. Bloomberg is no different to Google in this regard, it doesn't generate the data, it just fetches and aggregates market data from various sources which anyone could technically do with enough effort and yet people pay for it.

They add their own interpretations and calculations of footnotes to financial statements. It’s a step beyond categorizing and aggregating.

At this point I’d pay for it. Every search I do these days is a fight with Google to find pearls buried in the overwhelming muck. I’d sincerely like to see how search curation would change if the intent was to keep me as a paying customer, not to show me more ads.

I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business in selling a quality search engine.

Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.

Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing.

Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.

Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.

Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it says. Will there be an in browser solution?

We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.

Give Neeva a try (disclosure I work with them). We offer a freemium model (free basic and premium version for $5/month that includes paid versions of VPN and password manager), it's ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.

Just a user of Neeva here but a happy one. Also very excited to hear about the work toward an independent stack! Enjoy the spaces and immersive search UIs for various types of searches. Neeva make search fun again. ;)

I am using their beta search service. It does seem nice enough. I am not sure yet how it compares with DDG, but I am probably going to sign up as a paying customer.

DDG is just repackaged Bing with their own ads inserted.

You really think you're unique?

No, but one among few.