Yeah, once you hit the free limit, you get served a subscription wall once you try to do a search

Fwiw, I initially burned through the free searches in a few days, so definitely not enough IMO. Add the fact that free searches never got refreshed for my account, and I was pretty much unable to properly test the service for months. But bangs still work after the limit, thus I kept it as default given that I heavily use bangs to search other services.

Still I ended up subscribing, and after properly testing, I can recommend. The service is good, the blacklist feature is essential to me now; is just that the free tier is shit.

The free searches aren't supposed to "refresh". They are once per account.

Personally I'm fine with the 300 searches/month, however that means I don't use Kagi for searches that are extremely simple.

I just prefix "simple" searches with !g or !gi, bangs don't count against the limit

Why waste your mental energy on this? Searches cost like 1.5c once you go over the limit. It's not worth thinking about.

Also you can enable browsing history and use bookmarks to autofill stuff without having to use a search engine.

Look at your browser history to find out how much you search. I was surprised to find that I’m consistently nowhere near 300.

Yeah, I found the opposite for me, as I expected. I did a little under 400 queries in the last 30 days. I could definitely cut down a lot of redundant or simple searches to get under 400, but given how ubiquitous it is for me to simply so random questions (or simply search around a lot for documentation via search engine) I'd rather not have to worry about it.

On top of that, this is during a month without any job (where I'd search even more on the clock). I hear it's 1.5 cents per query over but I can imagine doing 600+ searches once I'm employed again.

> I was surprised to find that I’m consistently nowhere near 300

Per month?

My current Kagi searches from 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches. For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.

300 per day??? That’s a search per minute for 5 hours. Are you even doing anything else?

Eh?

> 3rd of January until today sits at 1256 searches

1256 / 23 (days between today and Jan 3rd) = 54.6 searches on average per day.

Some days higher, some lower. Sometimes it can take a couple of tries to get the search right, so you do 5-10 searches in one minute maybe. Doesn't seem farfetched to me.

> For sure I'd do 300 searches in a week, and on a particularly hairy day I might do it in a day.

Yeah, that's "on a particularly hairy day", not "per day" for a full month...

I didn’t say it was every day.

Ok, well, thanks for the intellectually stimulating discussion, I hope you have a nice day :)