> Worth the $5 for me

Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.

They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.

I do agree it's kinda expensive. I'm lucky enough that my employer pays the $25 plan for met because it includes access to many LLMs.

> because it includes access to many LLMs.

That is interesting, which LLMs? Asking as someone paying monthly Claude subscription.

A lot of them. Claude is a choice. Here is the list : https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

You can even choose a model for each turn.

I pay the $10 and use assistant multiple times a day and never needed the fatter models since for coding I have copilot and Gemini

True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)

I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.

I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.

I have the habbit to serach for words to verify their spelling. Very costly habbit when i got kagi.

When i do actually use it for search; it's amazing... assuming I've not already burnt my quota.

I'm not sure if "habbit" was a deliberate misspelling here, but regardless I think it makes the comment better! Lol.

... Darn. (read my username)

onelook.com works for this usecase. Allows pattern searches, and can set it as a custom search engine.

> OneLook scans 16,965,772 entries in 805 dictionaries. Use it to find definitions, related words, quotes, names, lyrics, colors, and more.

The 300 searches a month work for me because I only use Kagi when I think it will give better results than others. And most searches are trivial so any free engine will do (like you have the website name and want the url).

$10 is nothing if you're searching that often to no longer be the product.

https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google

Agree the $10 plan is so worth it as to be a complete non-question as to whether to renew whenever it comes up.

Also, super cool link, thanks for the share.

One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.

That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.

Pretty much sums up why Google’s business model changed. Everyone wants good search, few are willing to be even $10/mo.

You know how many things are asking for "~$10/mo". People don't have the purchasing power they used to, and everything has a subscription model. Firefox with DDG is good enough.

As they said, you wouldn't pay $10/month for search. This is why free pay-with-your-data services won. Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.

> Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.

I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.

(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)

Kagi support zero knowledge search through a Firefox extension and Mullvad supports zero knowledge VPN by putting cash in an envelope with your account ID written on the outside.

I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits. Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).

The US government knows everything though.

Sure. I’m not saying you should pay for search just saying it is not economically feasible to monetize it directly. I pay for Kagi, but that makes me part of a very niche market.

Google kept increasing its profits since then, and it was one of the most successful businesses out there way before they changed the business model to become enshittified. The argument that their business model changed because people wouldn't pay for its services doesn't really stand.

If they charged a newspaper price for it per se (like $1 a month), Google would be rolling in cash with as many users they have.

Newspapers are not $1/month.

And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.

You are worth much more than a dollar. Each search is worth between 10 and 90 cents. If Google shared that with the user people would be happier

FWIW Kagi has worked hard on their pricing over the last few years and has been trying different models. They're not "big search" the price is what it is so it can exist as a business. 100% fine to not be a customer obviously, but then you forfeit your license to complain about Google spying on you and ruining the web. Like they're trying to solve the problem. IMHO speaking just for myself I feel a moral duty to support them.

I agree on all your points. I'm just saying, that the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota. I'm sure they have done their research and maybe increasing it will cannibalize the $10 tier.

You can not find the value of 10 searches a day for 5 dollars and complain about Google. Yandex,DDG and Bing are major search engine choices.

Kagi has limitations like not showing sites with ads which many people with ad blockers don't mind.

What do you mean Kagi doesn't show sites with ads ?

They lower the rank of sites with ads often pushing them out.

Kagi lets you re-rank sites, and also lets you ban results from sites you don't like.

It's relatively rare as of late that I need to specifically find something on the internet, and DDG does not suffice, so I rarely exhaust the 300 Kagi searches.

Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.

The $10 plan is worth it.

My time, attention, and “brain” are valuable. Having aligned incentives with my search provider and control over the results it serves me through weighting is worth substantially more than I pay for unlimited.

Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.

That prompt mixes in unrelated results about the workings of search engines. You could just use `udm=web`:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web

Good workaround! It's just sad that to achieve the previous behavior we now need to burn significantly more compute, and in turn energy, and with far worse performance and an inverted UX.

The most frustrating part is that they have all of the data, and oodles of compute, available to surface the same very functional experience they originally offered, but they would prefer the image of being visionaries rather than the reality of being useful.

I think the "original experience", whatever it may have been (and I strongly suspect there's more nostalgia here than actual worse results) would be very quickly overrun by modern SEO methods / tactics.

Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all. They're small enough that nobody does SEO against Kagi. If their algorithm is sufficiently different that typical Google tactics don't work on it, even if it's much more naive because of that, Kagi wins.

I paid for Kagi a couple months, and was rather unimpressed with the quality of results.

Ah haha that is kind of funny it finds exactly what I was looking for, just much slower than 15 years ago.

Kagi works by scraping Google and other engines, so this should still worry you.

I still support the use of Kagi though, as a market signal to Google that we'd even pay them for their product if it wasn't dogshit.

For Google, the business side of you paying them doesn't work out as obvious as it might seem.

Advertisers are sold the idea that 1000 clicks/impression is X dollars. The average impression might be priced at 1000/X$.

But you are worth much more than that for two reasons.

- you are a person willing to pay 5$

- Google can sell a “collectivized” product. The same way that eg collective farmer crop insurance creates actual value.

and the third reason (as consequence of the second) they dont want people to think about: it gives them more opportunity to fudge the value by making it all very complicated.

If they don't want to sell me a deshittified product, I'll continue paying someone else to extract the deshittified product from them. Their choice.

The advert paradox, anyone willing to spend money to avoid ads is inherently worth more to advertisers, since they're willing to spend money.

The more money you're willing to pay to avoid ads the more you're worth to advertisers.

That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.

I'm willing to pay time or money to avoid ads, not to be spied and harassed by companies making me offers to buy something that almost certainly I don't want to buy. Those companies should pay me a percent of what I make them save by not buying ads to serve me.

And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.

I don't understand your logic. Why would someone that never sees my ads be valuable to me? Why would I care? Everyone spends money on something, the fact you spend it on adblockers doesn't make you automatically more valuable to advertisers. I have never heard of this "advert paradox" concept you mention and I have worked in industry for a while now. All this is just conjecture on your part and doesn't really correspond to how it works.

If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products so the advertiser is willing to spend up to $24 to make you not block ads about a $30 product you'll buy (that costs $5 to make)

That does not make sense at all. Why would you care about people who want to avoid ads? The real data shows very little people actually do that. How much you spend on adblocker is irrelevant to your profile for a business. They will get you some other way if you ad block on digital.

> If you have $20 to spend avoiding ads, you have $30 to spend on cool products

Yes, but if you are so against ads that you spend $20 to not see ads (I am definitely in this group) and then see an ad for a "cool product" anyway, then that product is no longer cool. Any time something like this happens, I legitimately develop a grudge against that company and their products.

I might have bought that product before seeing the ad, but there is no chance of that after seeing the ad.

No you don't. Studies always show that you don't. You think you do, but you don't.

Before the ad, you didn't even know the product existed. Now you know it exists, making you infinitely more likely to buy it.

> Studies always show that you don't. You think you do, but you don't.

Did those studies have any outliers that DID have a negative reaction to ads? I am 100% certain I'd react EXTREMELY negatively in a situation like that.

The same way I wanted to buy a Tesla and rented one a couple of times in the past. Now I would NEVER AGAIN even go into a Tesla. Fuck that company.

> That's why tools like uBlock and YouTube morphe are the only answer, negotiating with terrorists never works.

This is silly. The economy doesn't work if no one is willing to pay for goods. The content you're consuming won't be made if theres no market value to create it in the first place. Pirating is not a solution to our data privacy problem.

The capitalist economy is based on the explicit idea that everyone will do everything they can to extract value from everyone else, and it'll come to some kind of equilibrium. If you do not do this but you allow everyone else to do this, you receive worse quality products for ridiculous prices and do nothing about it.

In other words, you owe me $1000 as a condition of reading this comment. Your options are to unread the comment, pay me $1000, or pay me nothing to incentivize me to charge a price you'll actually pay (likely $0.00 for comments but not for everything)

Free riders send a market signal of failure or they cause friction. In the former, the service or creator just shuts down and moves on to something else. In the latter the service must make a choice with very little knowledge.. what should they do? Bake ads into the content? Ad block wall? Subscription? Pay per view?

Basically it doesn't make any meaningful progress towards a better outcome. It just temporarily makes the content more enjoyable to you at the expense of the person who created it and maybe to you if you enjoyed it and wanted more.

The internet had a plenty of content before advertising.

I'm not making an argument for advertising.

Sad but true. I paid for Prime to be ad free, easily worth 3$/month but sure enough now part of their catalog has become "only available with ads" or ads in their FireTV is before you hit the prime app (and then again when you do). So now their whole product is crap and I'm looking for a new streaming stick solution [anyone?] Sounds like it's time for a newcomer/disruptor like Angel Studios to release one.

Natural next step of the ad lobby is obviously to pay the lobby to make it illegal to bypass the money making machine if they haven't done so yet. I don't doubt that capitalism still works, it just takes time to "boil the frogs" dead [enough] to stop them from buying such crappy products.

I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.

To anyone who didn’t find Kagi useful in the past, I strongly recommend you try it again, as they have made huge strides in usability and quality of surfaced data in just the past year…. Huge strides since even a few months ago too, with more adaptive curation, data labeling, and UI/UX

> I’m pretty sure Kagi’s entire pitch is that they’re an alternate and original dataset. Theirs is the only search engine whose data isn’t based upon google or bing’s databases.

It's not. In addition to their own indexes the results include calls to "all major search result providers worldwide"[1].

There are independent search engines that only use their own index, like Mojeek[1]. Kagi is explicitly something like a search engine aggregator.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... [2]: https://www.mojeek.com/

Kagi is mostly based on Bing and Google results, officially by API and not scraped, and ranked by there own mechanism I think.

Officially Kagi pays SerpAPI to scrape Google for them, since Google doesn't have an API they'll let Kagi use.

Interesting. So this means the new google.com/goto will exclude Kagi from the results?

Not necessarily, as evidenced by TFA, whose scraper still seems to work even after it visits each individual SERP entry to harvest the URLs.

But Kagi’s SERP API provider is going to have to adapt, I guess.

Kagi was using Yandex, it comes up on every Kagi post here. Seems that they've removed that info from their site now though...

Kagi don't scrape, they pay other engines for API access: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

>Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide

The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.

There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.

So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.

Marginalia likely returns better results than Google, when it returns useful results. DDG/Bing likely returns average quality results which can be better than Google's slop results. It's not true that Google is the only useful one.

Is Marginalia the only real competing search engine?

AFAIK Brave Search is also using its own index.

They pay scraping sites for results, including SERP API. When I pointed this out, last time Kagi was discussed on Hacker News, an employee of Kagi said that they're trying to build their own internal index, but he didn't provide details.

They use a ton of different search index's from what I've seen. Kagi Small Web is also awesome

I believe they are building their own index but targeted towards useful results not included in the others

> You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. the search request: %s

Thanks, I needed to add a ?aep=11&atvm=2&udm=50 for AI mode. Wow!!!!!

>You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:

I'm using Kagi every day, and unfortunately, it is not true anymore. I think what happens is that the blanket banning of IP ranges because of LLMs, and flat out incompetence and laziness, affects them heavily. I get results, or just a few unrelated ones many times every day, while Google happily returns what I searched for. I think Kagi's index is shrinking, or they really made their algorithm worse.

I slowly shifted to use LLMs because of this in the past half years, making the situation probably worse for Kagi. They were the last usable search engines for years now. I still pay for it, but it's increasingly not that useful anymore.

Same here. Been paying for Kagi for probably a year or so, but I find that it hasn’t really been able to keep up with at least my personal expectations. It feels quite slow (which I don’t remember it always being), and the search result quality is not always the best. On top of that, the 10$/mo is a little steep for me, given that their assistant and maps are quite sub-par in my opinion. I would have preferred them to focus more on the search experience, and less on the other products. Or give me a cheaper plan for only unlimited search without the other products.

> It feels quite slow

It definitely is. The extension-based redirect in Safari is also unreliable. Furthermore, many of my searches (and others', apparently) unexplainably defaulted to Groningen in the Netherlands, even though I'm nowhere near the place.

I ended up not renewing my annual subscription. Since then, I vibecoded a small userscript that replicates domain ranking for DuckDuckGo – plus DDG already lets you turn off ads natively.

Ironically google has a datacenter there (every company is there basically)

Assistant depends heavily on which of the many models you use. I've most recently liked results from Kimi K2.7 Code.

Can you provide any examples of failed Kagi searches that Google returned without issue? I've never run into that.

...you.. do know classic Google Search is still an option, right? Just add `&udm=14` to the search URL.

Also Google AI mode is accessible on google.com/ai.

Oh that shorthand is fun. Curious it works at all.

But yeah I'd switch to Kagi if I had any more forcing function. Maybe without LLM's but google continously getting worse, that'd been the actual thing for me

I like Kagi, but is it me or have their results been less than great for the past 1-3mo? Maybe the places they're pulling their results from have had some changes?

I haven't noticed.

Kagi seems to heavily rely on Yandex for results. I don't use it, so can't compare, but are results much better than using Yandex directly?

I'd say that the ranking, and thus the relevance, is noticeably higher. If I know what I want to find, Kagi is good at surfacing exactly that, not something vaguely related.

I see, thanks.

Kagi is good but it’s about 25x too expensive (no really).