[SirensOfTitan]

The pricing changes are unfortunate, yes, since they encourage me to think about querying, which ought to not be the case.

The more worrying update here is that Kagi is not grandfathering in legacy plans beyond the next billing cycle, which is a departure from a promise:

> If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it.

Kagi's claim to privacy is intrinsically tied to their capacity to keep their word. If they say one thing and do another with pricing, how can I trust they'll do what they say when it comes to privacy?

I paid for Kagi the first moment I was allowed to, and this news soured me on Kagi overnight. Trust is hard to earn back.

[D13Fd]

Agreed. I also don’t like how they are jumping on the AI bandwagon and splitting their efforts between search, a pointless new browser, and AI. It’s like Google all over again.

I’m happy to give them $10 or $25 per month for excellent search and privacy. But I’m really not interested in funding their other junk.

[wallmountedtv]

An important tidbit from their Discord. The AI is just the commercial one from OpenAI. Paying $5 per 50 search summaries for it according to the founder of Kagi.[1] It is not in-house.

1: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/925992877602000967/... (Backup: https://imgur.com/McoRELC )

[CyanBird]

Sorry for the value statement

But good lord, that's such a dumb, dumb, dumb decision to integrate this thing onto Kagi then

I'll keep my subscription on the 10usd one, but yeah this drops my interest on the company precipitously and rather than just recommend it, I will just not, or do it with a warning that the roi of subscribing is only so-so

[poxrud]

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I thought that their summarizer tool was amazing. I was using it multiple times a day to get summaries of long articles and pdfs.

[nifoc]

They have updated the FAQ section of the announcement to directly address this (very, very valid) point:

> Q. Didn’t you say in September that current subscibers will be grandfathered in?

> A. Yes we did say that in September. We are sorry that we have to walk back on that promise and we should have done a better job at communicating the pricing change debate that has been going on for over three months with our community.

> A lot of things changed in the meantime that we could not anticipate and predict, namely increase in search costs and popularization of generative AI which further increases the cost and making us lose even more money per user than before. That is not sustainable for a bootstrapped startup and we had to make the next best decision.

> The decisions made (the price change and cancellation of grandfathering) is exactly the necessary step to keep us in the business of search, aligning incentives between us and users, and keeping the best interest of our users in mind.

> We did the best we can, and we will still going to grandfather in everyone for up to a year on the old plan, and then on a special plan after that indefinitely (which still loses us money, just less). Discussion about this was long and hard and we made the best possible decision given our abilities and the circumstances.

This is so incredibly disappointing and basically confirms that we're (at least in part) paying for their AI experiments - something that I personally am not at all interested in.

[version_five]

There was a thread here [0] a month ago about the AI stuff at Kagi, my take was commenters were overall enthusiastic about it. At the time I said I wouldn't pay for it [1] and got a bunch of replies telling me how valuable it was.

I really want Kagi to succeed, I've been following the results of the pricing change closely because it seems like it's not going well and I don't want them to go out of business. I hope it will convince them to drop the AI stuff, or at least confirm that there's strong evidence it will pay off somehow, not just the hype that makes everybody fawn over llm stuff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646389

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647775

[gilrain]

I jumped on Kagi with multiple family members due to their grandfather promise. The lie hurts all the more because they aren’t a big company. If they’re already “altering the deal”, what will they do when they’re big?

[cooperadymas]

Agreed on both accounts. As someone who is not even a heavy user - I have over $50 in "surplus" right now, meaning they're making money off of me - I am likely to cancel for both of these exact reasons despite the fact that the actual charge to my credit card would not change next month (and I could even cut my cost in half if I wanted to).

[hojinkoh]

> I paid for Kagi the first moment I was allowed to, and this news soured me on Kagi overnight. Trust is hard to earn back.

Me too. I still have many months of my early-adopter $10 unlimited annual subscription left. I'm going to start drafting my migration plan several months later. I no longer trust them, nor do I want to do business with them anymore.

There's the Bing API price thing yeah. But it's also clear that they're trying to fund their AI experiments. I'm a paid user of OpenAI's GPT-3 API and ChatGPT plus. I routinely ask the GPT family to imagine things for me. But I don't want my search engine to imagine things, even if they're based on search results.

I speculate Kagi knew their target audience won't be happy about paying them for AI things, so they just came up with the whole average monthly search things as a cover...