[Vegenoid]

Especially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot.

If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.

[outlore]

Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake.

Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt.

I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.

[3PS]

For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.

Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D

[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective

[thfuran]

But would that make it effective advertising?

[diggan]

But isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.

[justinclift]

That sounds pretty silly.

Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?

[diggan]

Based on their public data, they have 20,000+ paying users, and 1500 users paying for the family plan, which if all of the users are on the cheapest $5/month plan (which, many probably are on the $10/month plan like myself, as that gives you unlimited searches) would give them $100K+ each month.

Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.

[jsnell]

The expensive parts of the infrastructure are not their own, and the expense will scale by number of requests.

Back of the envelope:

The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier.

Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, indexing and ranking and avoid paying some larger search engine for API access. But for that to be cheaper, they need orders of magnitude more scale

[outlore]

I suppose it wouldn't! Perhaps it might develop brand awareness. (I am thinking about Nike's swoosh or Vercel's triangle)

[pseudocomposer]

I’ve used Kagi as my default search engine for months and wasn’t aware it had a dog mascot either! I’ll probably turn the shirt into some word-of-mouth marketing at my gym, so I wouldn’t say my free shirt is a terrible investment.

[smsm42]

Looked at the shirt, it looks pretty nice. Definitely something I'd wear and not feel like I am a walking ad.

[rbits]

Yeah, no one's going to wear a shirt that says Kagi on it. They'll wear a shirt with the mascot on it though

[viraptor]

You're way too sure about other people's choices. I'd totally wear one.

[ambrose2]

I definitely would, I generally don’t wear graphic t’s.