People don’t want to pay for things.

I want. And I do. Notable examples are Kagi.com and Raindrop.io. I've also been sponsoring a number of projects for a number of months, from journalism to social media startup.

But I am getting more hesitant as often when I (and others) do it seems companies think they can increase their prices wildly or do other stuff.

I have this exact feeling now with Logseq: I started paying for sync a while ago and it seems so did others and now they are rewriting the whole thing from plain text[1] to some kind of database based storage :-/

[1]: which could be synced over git, transferred effortlessly into another application and was one of the reasons I went with Logseq

How many of those companies are profitable? How many do you think you will see a blog post about in a year or two - “Our Amazing Journey” where they won’t either go out of business or get acquired and their product gets shut down”?

From Kagi’s website

https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#:~:te...

We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month.

Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs.

That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).

Wrong blog post, try this one ;)

https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi

So what do you know about kagi’s profitability :).

I’m honestly glad to hear that. Until I heard your interview with Gruber, I thought Kagi was the same company that use to provide a payment platform for Mac indie developers.

It’s always good to see a bootstrapped company become successful without enshittification. I put you up there with BackBlaze.

I see you have investors now (not saying that is a negative). Are the laws still the same about having to be a “qualified investor”? Can anyone invest - asking out of curiosity.

For the particular type of investment we were doing (angel list roll up vehicle with basically our users) one needs to verify they are an accredited investor.

There probably are. The real question is why are they not successful. Maybe they need to solve distribution. I use Google Calendar tasks for todos because it is there, handy, for example.

As sister comments have said there is no money in it. They are stickiness plays or just bets for Google.