[SadTrombone]

Kagi is great, and I'd pay some amount of money for it, but $10/mth is simply too much for me personally to pay for a search engine. I understand why others do and enjoyed my Kagi experience, however. If only the $5 plan had more than 300 searches.

[201984]

Depends on your financial situation, but $10 is nothing these days. That's the price of a bougie coffee, half the price of going out to eat, half the price of a movie ticket, or less than 2 gallons of gas in some states. For most people here, it's probably 20min of labor after taxes or less, for something you use constantly. You pay several times more, possibly 10x more, for the internet you use Kagi on. Really not a bad deal from that perspective.

[j1elo]

So you live in one of the most expensive countries in the planet I guess, which forced you to get used to those absurdly high prices?

In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:

* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.

* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)

* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)

* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.

[econ]

This is such a wonderful website

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp

This is the broadband page.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...

[darkamaul]

Thanks for sharing this one, that’s truly a gem that I had no idea existed

[econ]

This one is also great

https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street

Made by Hans Rosling (among others)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

[nixgeek]

I think I’m on the upper end of what’s normal in U.S. but also not super abnormal either —

1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.

2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.

3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.

[TwoFerMaggie]

> A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX

For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.

https://mein.cineville.de/en/order

[wccrawford]

Some of the US theatres (Regal, for instance) have something like that, too.

[NamlchakKhandro]

you guys are getting ripped the fuck off

[inigyou]

It's rent. Rent varies based on location, and sets a price floor for all goods and services in that location.

[carlosjobim]

Your mobile carrier and your fiber connection are great deals. That doesn't make $10 per month for Kagi an "absurdly high price". It's still a good deal. And they are completely different things.

I have very cheap electricity. If I compared other prices to my electrical bill, I couldn't purchase food, gas, Internet, or anything really. Because I'd say they are "absurdly high prices".

[miek]

That's such a shocking dispersion between telecom and dining out, I figured an LLM could help here. Gemini says "It's Spain"

[chrisweekly]

which corner is that, where you live?

[crossroadsguy]

Well, the currency symbol might throw a hint. Because Americans of course use USD and rest of the world is pressured into using USD on online forums :)

[cadamsdotcom]

Also the $22.83 for something that should be a round number.

Slapping sales tax on before the final price (but after the price in your head) is one of America's less charming quirks. No one else in the entire world does it.

[chrisweekly]

(eyeroll) "somewhere in the EU" is still fairly broad

[driverdan]

It's nothing until you have to buy a $10/m subscription for every basic thing you do, then it adds up.

[protimewaster]

That's what gets me too. I've been tasked previously to help a young relative with budgeting, and there were so many "It's only $x a month!" items we found that it was ridiculous.

It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.

[ycombinator_acc]

People not from North America and Western Europe exist.

[crossroadsguy]

These people either don't understand what living in a "world" means or are just too stuck into "but rest of you don't pay" that it will be hard for them grasp anything beyond what's written in stone on those grey surfaces for them. What they also don't understand that a small fraction of paying customers in some of such countries might or will outspend entire country's regular spending in the "paying world". They also don't understand that to achieve that unlike physical goods these companies don't have to open agencies, distributors, warehouses, retail chains etc to "sell".

PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.

[jmhammond]

Also, people in North America who don’t have tech jobs exist. I make pretty good money as a teacher, and it’s still significantly less than many of the parent posters salaries.

[KetoManx64]

Yeah but you make up a small percentage of sales for US tech companies comparatively.

[carlosjobim]

Have you met those people? A lot of them have ten dollars.

[ycombinator_acc]

We’re talking median annual income of $10,000. I could forgive someone getting paid that not wanting to spend that $10 on an internet search engine instead of food.

[carlosjobim]

Okay, but why single out Kagi? Everything is too expensive if you don't have money. Should all companies in the world stop making their products, except energy, food, and shelter?

And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.

[ycombinator_acc]

Because... the post is about Kagi?

> And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.

What on Earth? Ok I'll bite. $70 is about 1% of median monthly income for someone making $80K/yr, meaning it's perfectly fine for somebody with the median US income, by your own logic. Would you pay $70/mo for a search engine?

And no, no one should stop making their products. No idea how you'd come to that conclusion after reading my comment (that said, companies could definitely stand to introduce regional pricing).

[Pavilion2095]

$10 is nothing when it's $10, but everything is a $10 subscription these days - and you end up spending a lot of money.

[Gud]

All of your examples are things many people are no longer doing because they can't afford them.

[201984]

People are no longer buying internet to use google, nor buying gas for cars? The others I understand, I'm cutting back on them too.

[konart]

>nor buying gas for cars

In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.

And some people [who own a car] actually stop using one when prices for gas go over the bar unless they absolutely have to.

[protimewaster]

> In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.

Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."

I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.

[FabHK]

Well, sure, and so you rarely or never go there. Most people I know don't have a car. Doesn't mean there aren't cars in the country.

[Gud]

Yes, people are driving less when gas prices are high.

[jubilanti]

Even in the US, which is already very HCoL, I think you seriously underestimate the number of households who've either never had who have cut household Internet. Lots of households where everyone's Internet access is on smartphones via MNVO mobile carriers, typically on $10-$20/mo/line plans with 5-25GB/mo/line.

[JohnFen]

I consider that expense to be well-spent. The value I get is well worth the price.

[tombert]

$10/month is a bit steep, but if you have any friends and/or family members you could split the costs with, I don't think that the family plans are unreasonable. That's what I do now.

[secabeen]

Do they even expose much cross users? One of my sports apps has a Family Plan, and my "family" is three other players who organized ourselves on FB. We split the cost evenly and it saves us like 50% each. I don't even know their names.

[armoredkitten]

I stick with the 300 searches plan, and most months I don't hit the limit. That said, part of my strategy is if I'm searching for something that I know will show up readily (say I am trying to find a particular website, I just don't remember if it's .com or .org or whatever), then I use DuckDuckGo instead. Not because it's better, but because it saves one of the 300 searches for something more useful.

[carlosjobim]

Enable Safari suggestions, and it will suggest the website you're looking for most of the times while typing in the URL bar, and you don't need to bother with a search engine for those cases.

[benhurmarcel]

I do the same thing, I only use Kagi when the result I want isn’t obvious, so the cheap plan is plenty. It’s easy to do with the browser’s shortcuts.

[russelg]

AFAIK using the bangs (e.g. !g) do not consume your search quota, so you can do it via that as well.

[haburka]

I have hit the 300 search limit once in a few years. It’s usually quite enough

[neysofu]

Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats:

Jul 2026 939

Jun 2026 1,317

May 2026 1,924

Apr 2026 2,537

Mar 2026 2,183

Feb 2026 2,038

Jan 2026 2,392

[Groxx]

Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't.

Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM?

Instead I just cancelled.

[Novosell]

I seem do to about 1000 searches a month, though I'm not sure if that's also including my partners usage.

Less than 10 searches a day is crazy to me :O

But I have quite PC-centric hobbies, I suppose.

[freehorse]

It depends on how often you search to find things, how much chronically online you are etc. I do 800-1200 searches per month, and that's excluding !w etc bangs that I also heavily use.

[mihaaly]

That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries. If you need no advanced Ai tasks then that is way enough.

Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.

[temp0826]

If they offered a cheap plan ($2-3/mo) without the extras I'd sign up in a heartbeat. I happily pay for nextdns and being in that ballpark is reasonable to me.

[Havoc]

There is also uruky. They’re functionally unlimited on $5 but less developed feature wise

[BrunoBernardino]

Thank you so much for the mention! Uruky co-founder, here. Let me know if there's some specific feature you'd like to see added (email or a reply here is fine), so we can evaluate!

[flakiness]

This is such a you-must-be-an-iphone-user comment. Enjoy the good life.