[freediver]

(Kagi founder here)

You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot).

But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential.

How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

[danpalmer]

> How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.

As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that group because they won't pay for search, but for users who would pay for search they might see that tier and feel that the quotas are stingy and they're being forced up the pricing tiers for behaviour that to them feels normal.

I don't know what your subscriber base looks like, but as an armchair spectator... I'd probably drop the $5/m tier and then emphasise that the "Professional" tier comes with "10x the number of searches that an average internet user makes", or whatever the multiplier actually is.

Also it would probably go some way towards assuaging fears of running out of searches if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.

[freediver]

> but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.

When we had only the $10 plan, we were getting messages from users that that plan is too pricey for them when they don't search as much.

Hence the $5 month and now about 5% of our users are on this plan. (and Kagi still has zero marketing spend). You have to start somewhere. This gives us an opportunity to onboard almost everyone to Kagi.

> if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.

Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.

[unshavedyak]

> Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.

Sidenote, i'd really enjoy the rollover. At least to some degree. Not infinitely of course, but being able to mitigate the cost of some overages would be really nice.

Aside from that i'm a new customer (1st month), having gone through the trial and now on the $5/m plan. I'm quite happy. I expect i'll upgrade to the $10/m, but i hope i don't have to upgrade to the $20/m because i'll be debating if it's worth it. Regardless, a bit of a rollover price would help a ton with any cost aversion. Even if only up to 1 extra month, or w/e, of rollover. Anything would help.

Thanks for Kagi tho, i'm very happy so far! I also really love the continued work and improvements. It feels like i'm not just paying for the current product, but buying into a larger future product. Which also goes to mitigate cost aversion.

[danpalmer]

I don't know your unit economics (but they sound fascinating), but generally free trials are considered a marketing expense and would be worked into the CAC (customer acquisition cost). Then you can trade-off CAC with lifetime value (LTV) and a target payback period – i.e. the break-even period.

Let's say a search costs 1c, the free plan therefore costs $1. With a 5% 30d conversion rate that's a $20 CAC. On $10/m for 700 searches, that's just under 7 months to pay back which is quite long, but drops to just over 3 months if users average ~400 searches, so I can see why you don't want to roll over.

That said, if you believe you have a big LTV/long retention, retained users past their payback period should be more than enough to pay salaries/R&D/etc, so maybe there is more flexibility.

> Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.

I know it often feels like this, but I think the answer is more complicated. It's often hard to know what cost actually is – when you're hiring, growing, and selling a service running on tech that is hard to price.

I'm interested in how you know your cost per search at such a level of precision. It suggests to me that either you've done _way more_ work measuring it and optimising your infrastructure than I expect for a company of Kagi's age, or that it's a fairly naive number (understandably so!) based on dividing infra cost by number of searches. If it's the latter, are there economies of scale that significantly change the number if you have, say, 10x or 100x the user base?

[freediver]

The answer to the questions is long, nuanced and interactive. I'd be open to explaining it in a more interactive environment, for example our Discord server. kagi.com/discord - feel free to ping me there @VladP

[dcow]

Don't change anything. Your marketing is just fine. The commenter you're responding to is just voicing their surprise at discovering that most people don't actually use the internet as much as they do, or they're realizing they don't user it as much as they thought they did month over month, and, either way, consequently feeling insecure. They don't understand the difference between current user base and target market. You don't market to your current user base. You market to your target demographic. Like you said, if Kagi wants to attract average internet users, then having a plan that suites them is pretty important and in no way dishonest. I experience the same knee-jerk reaction when reviewing your recent pricing plan changes/updates. Then I thought about it for two seconds and obviously understood.

[benhurmarcel]

I currently subscribe to the $5 plan, and I'm happy with that.

Most searches I do are simple, any search engine will do. So I don't use Kagi for those. When it's not trivial, I just start my search with "k " to use Kagi. I easily stay below the 200 searches limit then.

For sure it would be more convenient to have unlimited searches, but I'm not willing to pay for a higher plan.

[aigoochamna]

Why not offer a bare bones subscription, like $2.50 per-month and charge by usage volume every month?

[alexruf]

Having a low entry is very important to get new users on board. But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway). This makes the standard plan absolutely unattractive even for non-tech-savvy professionals. But the professional plan also only offers 700 searches for $10.

Personally, I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches. Otherwise I don't know if I can judge $10 per month for a premium search engine whose service will not even last me for a whole month.

Don't get me wrong. I love the product and would be happy to pay for it, but your current pricing plans are just not very convincing to me and do not fit most peoples needs. Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.

[freediver]

Thanks for constructive feedback.

> But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly

They will not, a 'normal' user searches only 100 times a month.

> (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway

Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.

> I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches

We will. Pricing is not a matter of our mood though, but of economics, and once you remove advertisers from the equation the true cost of search surfaces. We were able to bring it down to just 1.5 cents per search.

> Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.

Isn't something you use every day, tens if not hundreds times a day, and helps you accomplish important stuff, in a more productive way worth the $25/mo then?

[alexruf]

> Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.

I really wish it would be that way. But from my personal experience non-tech affine people don’t care about privacy or ads that much (as long as it’s free). Just take my wife and father-in-law as an example: They have Google as their startpage in the browser. And instead of directly typing the URL into the browser bar, they will always do a search for it. I told them so many times, but they literally don’t care. And they are not completely wrong since it works for them. 99% of the time Google will return what they are looking for within the first result. No chance I can convince them to suddenly pay $5-10 for the same thing.

[eipi10_hn]

I'm currently in Early Adopter ($10) plan. If I move to $5 tier plan and move back to $10 plan in the future, which plan would I be at that time? Is it still Early Adopter?

[freediver]

Early adopter is a flag in the system that you can not lose (thank you for being one). Its perks will always be available to you.

[eipi10_hn]

Oh I see, tks for your explanation.

[emacdona]

> How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?

"Includes enough searches for X% of current Kagi users"

[emacdona]

BTW, I'm a happy Kagi early adopter currently subscribed at $10/mo. I do have concerns about even my limit, though. After I switched all my browsers (on all my devices) to use Kagi as the default search engine, I regularly exceed 1k searches per month.

I'm very curious how you measure the "average" user's usage. It seems hard for me to believe that even an "average" user (which I grant I am not) who has switched their browsers' default search engine to Kagi on their (one) computer and (one) phone -- assuming an average user has a computer and a smartphone -- uses less than 200 queries per month.

We've all been trained for years now (by Google) to type searches (not urls) into our browser's address bar. For so many people, the first action they take to "access the web" is to type something that is not a URL in their browser's address bar. I suspect this behavior is even _more common_ among "average" users ("power" users seem more likely to actually type "mail.google.com" instead of "gmail", for example).

[janandonly]

Would you consider making a pay-per-search model for the occasional users?

This way one search is maybe $0,05 or whatever, but at least one can use KAGI without signing up for an account.

Several paywall solutions exist for this, like:

- http://paywall.lightningj.org/ - https://medium.com/@infolightningj/lightningj-paywall-bringi...

[freediver]

Yes potentially, we found out that incorporating billing system is painful and takes away resources from our (small) team that we'd rather spend on building better search experience (like this update).

[janandonly]

I guess I’ll wait till you do find the resources.