> But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.
It’s a trial, you get 100 searches for free, then you have to start paying.
I don’t think you can call it a free tier but it’s a nice offer to evaluate the service before paying. I tried it for a bit and wasn’t happy with the search results, but I might try again though and use up my remaining searches.
I double checked because I was about to correct you, and you're right, but I could've sworn it used to be monthly (still low limit, but resets) so maybe GP remembers that too. Or perhaps it just wasn't as clear that it was a one-time trial before, and we both misread.
Looks like it used to be a free plan with a usage limit when they first launched in 2022:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/...
Ah, I wasn't aware that this had changed. There used to be a free tier that just limited the number of searches you could do per month.
Kagi is one of those things that immediately clicks once you actually use it.
Then you do a quick cost benefit analysis: how much money am I really saving when I use a "free" search engine that is intentionally shitty? If it takes me 2 hours to find a solution to something that took kagi 10 minutes,I've effectively saved almost 2 hours of my time and money. I can actually be more productive. Less headaches and frustration too.
But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my searches.
In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested in were almost entirely unfindable.
But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.