> Google search has become worthless for me. I use bing
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).
The main problem with Kagi is that it's a paid service with no free tier.
I get their reasons for this, and it totally makes sense -- but that's also a big problem for their growth. I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
I agree, but it’s a good early filter for conversion. The difference in quality, for me and everyone I’ve gifted a month to, is stark enough to make paying for search for the first time worth it. Given the absolute cost (for the cheapest tier, paid annually, less than $50) it’s a psychological hurdle more than a financial one for most Americans.
Also, drawing those eyeballs from the ad-driven engines has a disproportionate effect on their marginal ad prices (in the long run). So if you need a sense of vengeance to get you over the hill, there you go.
If kagi saturates the market of people that can afford to spend $50/year for a decent search engine, then Google ads will only reach people that cannot. This would greatly reduce the value of their ad inventory (far more than the percent market share they’d lose).
If they can keep is sustainable and profitable without eat-the-world "growth", that's not a bad thing.
There are few consumer products that have held up against the competing demands of billions users in thousands of different markets and cultures. I'd say there's maybe even been none.
The kind of "growth" you're talking about is a bad but understandable habit among founders and cold financiers, but it's not a requisite part of running a business and generally runs counter to having a good product that serves a specific need well.
Frankly, I see this as a good thing. Maybe someone else will come along and solve the universal-search-engine-that-stays-good problem, but Kagi's best hope at being useful for me into the future is for them to stay where they are: tiny and used only by a small cohort of extremely savvy and skeptical geeks that aren't worth the effort to SEO-jack.
They just need to be sustainable—growing large would actually be counterproductive.
> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
It's actually maybe ChatGPT et al. that have done most to warm me up to the idea. I've tried Plus for a few months, basically using it like better search. I don't think I'll stick with it mainly because it's a pretty steep cost (enough that I want to go back to not having it for a bit at least, see how much of a problem it really is) - but it does make me wonder if perhaps Kagi can get me a lot of the way for half the price (the non-LLM tier).
>> I know very few people who would pay for a search engine.
A 'fact,' which, if true, makes little sense when you look at it from the PoV as a tool.
With real physical tools, if you only use it occasionally, get a cheap one. But when you use it all the time, it pays to invest in a quality model.
Considering the frequency even the n00best of tech normies of the world use a search engine it makes sense for everyone to obtain such "a quality model." Sadly, that doesn't mean everyone will do so.
[me: Kagi unlimited user since they did the pricing change a couple of months back]
To be fair though, I don't rent my physical tools. I don't pay £20pcm for access to a quality drill or whatever, I just bought it once.
I'm not saying that should be Kagi's model, obviously it does have marginal costs for my usage that Makita doesn't, I'm just saying the analogy doesn't really hold up I suppose.
I think I'd probably prefer usage based pricing, but I know a lot of people here at least would complain that it gave Kagi an inverse incentive to build a good (at finding information quickly and easily) search engine.
But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.
No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.
But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn success. It's only within tech, where valuations and evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world, that people think of that as a failure of ambition or execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental models.
Why not? There are tens of millions of people who need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a better search engine than Google. And their success can inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality information products, so that maybe we can get out of this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.
Good products and ideas should be successful, that's progress.
> This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.
What?
If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures. Nobody owes anybody to keep a business running. So yes, it would die.
Sorry If I wasn't clear. But I think the question is pretty clearly stated in the post you responded to.
The question is: Does Kagi needs to grow to be sustainable, and if so, how much.
>If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures.
If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Companies need to make a profit or they go out of business. However, most businesses don't need to continually increase users/ revenue to stay afloat. The coffee shop down my street is 100 years old, and didn't need to double in size every year.
I agree that nobody is owed anything. I also think that Kagi is "owed" or "deserves" tells us nothing about how many users they need to keep staff paid and the lights on.
> If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Yeah, I would. We have to remember that these are guys who beat Google at their own game. They beat a company of a monstrous size and revenue at their own game. With that kind of capacity, I don't expect them to be satisfied with a million a year in profit to share. I expect them to go as far as they can.
If you're nobody special doing nothing special, then you can be happy with just needing to pay staff and keep the lights on. Like the coffee shop down your street, or my day job. But Kagi is clearly in a different category as a business.
Last I heard Kagi needs to grow a little bit more from current user base to break even.
Well if their goal is to make money, they haven't beaten Google yet.
Also, if you have a business that makes a million dollars a year and that's not enough, the typical solution is to sell it to someone else for 20 million or so instead of Burning It to the Ground
I don’t know what Kagi’s minimum sustainable size might be, but it’s probably bigger than what it is now. Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.
I suspect you're correct, and am rooting for them to hit sustainable, as soon as possible. I don't know what their maximum sustainable size is, either - that's equally important, though always a moving target. I only wanted to point out that neither inflection point, for a paid-service business model, has to do with "market share" - that's a VC thing, to which I'm increasingly allergic.
I didn't think I would. Then I tried it. Then I paid for the cheapest option because I really liked it. Then I paid for unlimited plan because I can't go back to crappy search after I tried the non-crappy one. And, thinking about it, why not pay for a good service? It costs less than cofee+pastry per month, and it improves the quality of my life. I think it makes sense. Some people may disagree, but as long as the service itself works, why would I care?
I know very few people who would pay for a search engine
If Google Search continues its downward trajectory, people will start to pay for Kagi or some other similar search engine. 10-20$ per month for unlimited search is nothing, at least in the western world.
You'd think so, and maybe that is indeed true for you. But I expected I would use several tens of searches per day, likely with some peaks over 100, but in the past 19 days I've only averaged ~15 per day, for a total of 291. The 300/mo plan wouldn't work for me either, but I don't blow past it as far as I would have expected.
Same, I finally gave up and tried it after Google just stopped being remotely useful, and DDG is just a reskinned bing. A week on Kagi and I signed up for an annual plan, and never looked back.
I’ve been thrilled with Kagi. It’s the first time in over a decade that searching became fun again.
The Quick Answer feature (Kagi’s LLM) filters through SEO better than Copilot, and the results are noticeably higher quality than ad-based engines. At $5/month for 300 searches, it’s cheap to try out (both for experience and if you actually notice the search limit).