[everforward]

Third party usage is too disparate for a single flat rate to make sense. Perplexity probably uses orders of magnitude more tokens than Kagi does (the former uses tokens on every search, the latter only does if you manually invoke the Assistant).

Then there's the disparity in how many third party services each user uses. Some will use one, some will use 50. Google could charge per integration, but that's basically the status quo.

[basch]

Why would the number of integrations be the price point and not token tiers? I might want to connect my account to 100 services to test them, but only perform a couple uses each before forgetting about it.

[everforward]

I agree that makes sense, but it makes potential subscribers to the third parties nervous. I like Kagi Assistant because my payment is capped.

I get nervous plugging my pay-as-you-go API keys into random software because of the risk they rack up a $1000 bill doing something I wouldn’t have paid $20 for them to do.

The other three things are that economies of scale make it cheaper for Kagi to buy a bajillion tokens, Google et al don’t want to manage the customer side of things (what service ate how many tokens?), and service providers don’t want you seeing their “magic” in your console. Seems like there’s a lot of power in the system instruction side of things, and Perplexity probably doesn’t want you seeing their prompt.

[basch]

So let me lock it down. When I add the key, let me tell my provider this service is allowed 3% of my capacity before it’s locked out.