[bigwavedave]

> Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?

Not really. Between free and paid users, TFA says they average roughly 27 searches per user per day; 1000 searches costs them $12.50. If each user (TFA says roughly 10% of searches come from the free tier) is averaging 810 searches in a month, that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.

I'm one of roughly 2.6k paid users at the moment; they estimate the need for 25k users to be sustainable. There's so much about google and most of its current alternatives that legitimately disgusts me- voting with my wallet is the only option I really have.

[pbhjpbhj]

>that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.//

You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.

That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?

Edit: this comment [0] indicates every search is actually 3 searches, two at commercial resale rates (Google, Bing) and one against their own index; that probably explains it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678059

[bigwavedave]

> You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.

All I can do is relate what the article says :).

> That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?

Well, they use a couple of paid APIs for their queries (as you noted in the edit of your comment). They say in TFA that they're currently breaking even on bare search costs and that the founders are picking up the tab for most of the rest of the expenses.