[infinityio]

(subscriber for the past 8 months, planning to convert to annual to lock in $10/mo for the next year and reassess then)

The AI tools they have been releasing are interesting, but Kagi desperately needs to decrease their average cost-per-search so that they can offer more realistic numbers of queries per month at a $10 price point.

I'm not sure what the solution is - maybe generating smaller indices for particular verticals? For some classes of question (for example looking up documentation) I would expect there are a surprisingly small number of sites that consistently end up as top 3 results, and everything else can be put behind a 'load more' button that queries the paid APIs.

(The problem then becomes identifying when this is the case)

While it wouldn't 'fix' the cost of long tail searches, identifying 'easy' searches and answering them directly might help - looking at my own search history, I'd say maybe 1 in 3 of my queries would fall under this category.

[neysofu]

I'll also convert to annual to get unlimited searches for a year. The search engine market is moving so fast now anyway that things may be well different a year from now.