[iowahansen]

Happy Kagi user here. I'm gladly paying $25 per month because of all their AI features, which work well for me overall. Yes, I could set up API keys on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral and get a similar experience for less, but I prefer the convenience of their interface and have clean search results bundled into the experience. I will continue to recommend them and hope that T-Shirt becomes available soon.

[thisisjasononhn]

Or you could spend $25 a month on a dedicated server and run SearxNG or Yacy? Good lord what an excessive amount of money that is to search the web...

[talldayo]

My thoughts exactly. It's stomach-churning to hear people talk about improving search and privacy for all, before putting it behind a prohibitively expensive (and probably inordinately profitable) subscription.

I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population. People buy food with that money, they pay rent, they live lives that aren't tethered to a search engine in a meaningful way. Google "wins" their traffic because they don't care, and every bit of friction in-between them and their content is extra work. Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.

That's not to say I don't understand the "avoid ads at all costs" concept. I do oppose to using anti-advertising sentiments as a populist rallying cry so people will line up at your Search SaaS kiosk and pay you whatever you ask for. At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper. And you can't even "dropbox comment" me since there have been third-parties providing search for free since before HN was a website.

[carlosjobim]

> I'll just say the quiet part out-loud: expecting people to pay $10+/month for a search engine is a pipe-dream that rules out 95-98% of the world population.

So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it? Most people will not be interested in paying for search, whether they can afford it or not. That's just what a niche product is, most people will not be interested. What I produce in my job is certainly uninteresting for 95-98% of the world population, and the same is probably true for your job.

> Kagi's payment-upfront mentality is unrealistic for everyone except the most well-paid Bay Area engineers.

It's ten dollars.

> At this point you really might as well just invest in your own Searx instance, it's plenty cheaper.

Yes, that might be a good solution for 95-98% of the world population.

[talldayo]

> So what? Why do you get upset about it, when nobody is forcing you to buy it?

Because this isn't a solution. Kagi doesn't save people from advertising, it creates a premium workaround and sells it at an arbitrary price per-customer. It's software-as-a-service, a SAAS, built more for the 1,000 true fans rather than the 100,000,000,000 clueless web users. That's just another business - perhaps a kinder and more transparent business - but a sinkhole of regressive moneygrubbing all the same.

> It's ten dollars.

Which is ten dollars more (per month!) than most people pay for a search engine. If you're the sort of person that just flippantly subscribes to that, then yes, you have lost track of the value of a dollar in my eyes. Like I said - you can host your own search engine and pay for your own top-level domain at that kinda price. It's absurd, I'd protest it on-principle even if I was upset with my current search provider.

There's room for this sort of startup in the world, but they've already lost if they don't offer a free tier. Google will hoover up their potential customers like nobody's business until they take the 98% seriously.

[carlosjobim]

> That's just another business

It is a business, what did you think? That's why they charge money for their service. Like millions of other businesses, they will never get any significant part of the world's population as users. Why is that a problem to you?

[rrr_oh_man]

GP probably has never paid a dollar for table water in their life.

[theshrike79]

If either of those was even close to the quality of Kagi searches, ever would start a new search engine startup

[xigoi]

Then someone decides to DDOS your server and suddenly you’re in serious debt.

[ibash]

I tried searxng. Sucked.

[mediumsmart]

Me too and I also happily support Orion and using the RC as a default browser.

Kagi is for a subset of the internet and specifically for the part that has content. The good parts of cyberspace if you like. OP seems to be looking for something bigger like someone they can trust to replace Google and save the internet as well. For that search I say good luck sailor

(see, that is the good thing in Kagi too - you can downvote ;)