It only feels that way because search has been free essentially forever.
But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain!
Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's steep.
If you had two pubs next to each other, one selling the best beer in the world for $1 a pint and the other giving away free low quality beer, the one giving away free beer would have an enormous line and the other a few people inside. You just can't argue with free when it comes to most people. People will drive for hours to get a free hot dog. People have got it in their head that things on the computer screen have to be free and you can't easily take that out of their heads.
Correction: one giving away beer with a little bit of arsenic in it. Which they have slowly been increasing as people build a bit of a tolerance to it.
No, it feels that way because music is a monthly service, any media is a monthly service cost, backups are monthly service cost, news are a monthly service cost, VPN is a monthly service cost, internet is of course a monthly service cost, password management is a monthly service cost, anti-malware/AV is a monthly service cost, ...this list just goes on and on.
And they want $10/month for unlimited searches full well and knowing $5/300 isn't even a reasonable bracket for half of us.
It's steep, and we're all swimming in in these costs.
$5/unlimited would be more reasonable, but it still piles on all these SaaS costs that everyone now uses. Gotta grow grow grow grow you know. Capitalism is great!
Hell, I'd even take $5/600. 300 is just ridiculously low. I like the service, mind you, but really can't justify paying $10/m (+ tax now) for it.
I should have jumped on the Neeva train when I had the chance. It was 50€/y. The results weren't as good as Kagi's, though. But anyway, Neeva's dead now.
The web had such a size that a catalog like Yahoo or Moz could cover a significant part of it. (I remember how Netscape was released, and how cool it was compared to Mosaic.)
I'm always surprised how cheap software engineers can be when purchasing products created by other software engineers, specifically designed around their needs.
No matter where you live on earth, if you're a software engineer $10/month is nothing. I seriously don't think you would notice if someone was quietly stealing $10 a month from you.
And yet that $10 a month would pay for a product that nearly all of us in this community wish existed.
But the biggest irony for me, is that all software engineers get paid what they do because someone on the other side of their business is willing to pay a lot more for what ever service you're ultimately helping to build. If everyone was this cheap about software, software engineers would be making minimum wage.
If you're in the Silicon Valley and spend most of your day on the Internet, $10 for superb search is a no-brainer.
If you're a student / postgrad somewhere in the US, it still likely feels worth the price, even though $10 is already not below the threshold of observability.
If you are, say, somewhere in Thailand, or Uzbekistan, or Botswana, the $10/mo become unironically noticeable: not prohibitive, but you really want to get a lot of value in exchange.
And basically anywhere in the world, if you're a kid, and mom and dad would not buy Kagi for you, you're out of luck.
But think -- really think -- about how much value you get out of search. Like, if you didn't have search, would you even be able to use the web? I think $10/mo for something I critically rely on several tens of times a day is a bargain!
Certainly it might be hard to sell search at $10/mo when people can get by at $0/mo. But that isn't the same thing as saying it's steep.