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by vosper 1390 days ago
> It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.

I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta testers will do more searches than average users, and I think that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see how they're going to avoid that.

[0] https://kagi.com/pricing

2 comments

That sounds unsettling, given the normal trajectory for software companies running at a loss (get VC, adjust goals to match VC desire, etc). For a privacy focused company it feels like they already lost the normal leverage line item of doing "something" with user data.

I dunno, "if you're not paying, you're the product", but how does that fit if you are paying, but what your paying isn't actually enough? Whats the other product?

Hope they do well.

I agree that it was an impressive product but couldn’t justify it based on the cost of living where I live and relative to other things I subscribe to (including my Fiber connection). I do hope things like this succeed.