Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.
Assistant was surprisingly useful. In a couple of occasions I had it find me research papers I didn't know existed for a problem I had been working on for long.
However the realization for me was that I shouldn't neglect search abilities of the LLMs I was already paying for. I tried to replace my Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions with Assistant but the usage limits were too low for me. And for the cases where I wanted to use long context of Gemini models, the assistant had an arbitrary limit of only 32k I think.
However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.
However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.