In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month. This credit will be applied to your next billing cycle, effectively covering your subsequent month’s subscription at no additional cost.
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It was okay while I was using it. Just a bit pricey. But I stopped using it when they started the whole “EUs GDPR doesn’t apply to us” non-sense. Simply not a company I can trust to handle personal data properly.
I also liked the part where they decided they don’t need to pay the VAT.
And yet I had to pay $12.10 for my $10 Kagi subscription…
From how I understand it, VAT only applies from a certain amount of revenue, so they didn’t have to pay it before but do now. Could be wrong though
This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
As a paying member, I know that they started charging (and presumably transferring) VAT last year.
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
I looked it up and there appears to be an exception for such cases where VAT is charged in the company’s jurisdiction rather that the customer’s (it’s usually the other way around) until you reach 10000€ annual turnover. Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
How is this FUD when you just said they admitted to it?
Exemptions vary by country, but often they only apply to small businesses.
Often there’s no right to any exemptions anyway if your company isn’t headquartered in the country (and Kagi is from USA).Either way you only have to pay VAT on transactions made after you go over the limit, while Kagi admitted they have to settle unpaid taxes.
This situation can only happen if they didn’t pay the taxes they already legally owed.See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3592-march-19th-2024-introducing-sales-taxes
Kagi will have to retroactively pay for all sales tax/VAT that we did not collect in the last almost two years. We have chosen to absorb this on behalf of our customers.
They tried to make themselves look like the good guys, while in reality they just paid back their overdue taxes they were required to collect all this time.
Not knowing the tax rules is not an excuse.
If they wanna do business internationally they can afford to hire an accountant.Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.
It’s not “extremely intransparent”, it’s just a little complicated.
And accountants are really cheap for small businesses.
I must have missed that, can you explain what you mean by that?
This old blog post summarises a lot of pain points: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Similar to Brave (and more recently Proton) I simply can’t trust them, despite liking the idea of their respective services.
Excellent read, thanks!
Isn’t this just the path of an immature company?
There’s a guy who is probably a programmer and he makes a thing, starts trying to sell it. Nothing here stands out as bad intentions, it just makes me think of what it might look like if I tried to start a company (a lot of stumbling).
Plus the blog post is pretty clear it’s their personal views. They spend a lot of time talking about the AI crap but when using Kagi it seems less intrusive than Google, and you can turn it off.
I dunno, I’ve seen this blog posted around a few times and there isn’t anything in here that puts me off so long as I treat it as what it is, a subscription for that month, not an investment in the future. If the company goes bankrupt because the CEO spent investors’ money starting a t-shirt company then I’ll just use a different search when they shut down.
Probably worth noting I use a relay email address not my main one, but I do that for almost everything.
After reading that essay I feel a lot more queasy about using Kagi. It’s just that I really despise ads, but I’m willing to put up with it, if the search engine company is more ethical. For the moment I’ve downgraded my account from 10 to 5 bucks a month. I wasn’t using any of the AI features anyway.
SearXNG ftw ! Also , who the heck stop using an entire month a search engine. Maybe in very isolated cases like vacations, or medic leaves, but come on…
Which instance do you use? Or do you selfhost it? It has been hit and miss for me. Not sure if I’m doing it wrong
I started using it on instances, like other WebApps example invidious, but instances get constantly banned and sometimes you can’t use them or rely on them. So yes I selfhosted it. You don’t need any special hardware. Docker is very simple to use . I even went further and used an old laptop as server with Linux , installed tailscale everywhere and using it’s feature FUNNEL (or SERVE if you don’t want to expose to internet) got my own domain , with certs, with reverse proxy in one shot. It’s a f miracle . Tailscale has full documentation and step by steps guides. I just followed those. If you want to make it even simpler, install proxmox and use containers . They are like tiny Linuxes with their own Mac, IP , etc
Thanks for the tips
searx.perennialte.ch has been great.
The real fair pricing would’ve been to only charge for the credits you actually use.
They tried various pricing plans although I forget if they experimented with both usage based and capped plans. Anything other than unlimited did not go over well with users. I had no desire to manage a monthly cap since my own daily usage varied so much. People had also become very conditioned to having unlimited search.
On the one hand yes but on the other hand this would also kind of set wrong incentives: to use Kagi search less because you’d need to pay more.
That’s not an incentive they or you would want.I think what I’d like is how my mobile carrier handles their data limits: It’s not an entirely fair comparison because in that case, contrary to Kagi, there is no real cost associated with my degree of usage of the service, making them entirely arbitrary and unnecessary but besides that the unused data rolls over to the next month and that’s something Kagi could mirror.
I hover around 600-1000 searches per month but sometimes exceed 1000. If I could pay for 1000/month and accumulate a little buffer in the months where I search less, that would work for me. Though perhaps I’d still want to just simply pay for unlimited usage for peace of mind.
That’s a brilliant idea to keep reporting users who abandoned the service as active users.
“This is to replace our previous unfair pricing.”
I wish they’d offer an llm free version with no cap on searches. Their products are too expensive and it feels like it is mostly to pay for the llms. I can’t justify paying that much for a product I am never going to use.
They do. The $10/month search plan is unlimited.
The only LLM stuff in their search product is the quick answers which can be turned off and page summaries which you have to explicitly click on in a submenu in any case.
As someone aware of how limited LLMs are, I’ve actually found both of these features to be useful for gauging whether a site is worth visiting or not at times which is part of the core feature set of a search engine IMHO.
A good while back they claimed that Google search index fees make up the vast majority of their costs, so I doubt any of your money is going towards LLM BS unless you actually pay for their assistant product.
I doubt Google has given them any discounts since then.I’d expect the development of all of their product to be mostly funded by VC. If they can get VC idiots who fell for the “”“AI”“” hype to subsidise building an actually useful thing (the search product), that’s a win in my book, even if they also have to build the AI crap on the side to keep said VC idiots happy.
Yeah I love those Kagi features, use them all the time.
Actually they have no VC in the traditional sense! They did private investment rounds, and I think they raised like 400k from like 60 investors or something. The actual numbers might be off, but I remember looking into this and it was lime 10/20k per investor on average, basically retail amounts.
After nearly a year of Kagi. It’s actually painful when I’m on a device with just Google.
Would recommend if you are a knowledge worker or researcher, or just in a technical field.
Makes me wonder how many people are subscribed to Kagi without using it. Then why would you have a subscription in the first place?
Seems such a weird edge case to me. If I pay for a search engine you can rely on me using it as my primary search engine. And I search the Internet daily, and certainly monthly. So this change wouldn’t help me at all
This must’ve been a lot more complicated to implement than to allow us to NOT SEND OUR SUBSCRIPTION MONEY TO RUSSIA.
sigh
I’ve been searching for an alternative search engine. Found Searx to be subpar.
Was thinking about Kagi, but if they work with the russians, that’s an immediate no go for me.
Are you referring to using Yandex?
I think they did explain that implementing turn off and on of specific engines per user is a complete rewrite of their querying system, so it is an expensive and complex change.
Removing yandex is OTOH not a great move as results in Russian language often come from there. Also morally I would generally agree, but then - especially now - you could argue about “giving money to US companies”, and that means they need to shut down, they can’t use bing, google, yandex.
They specifically avoid sanctions by routing payments through Kazakhstan, and tried to claim Yandex wasn’t even a russian company when called out.
And no, the US is not the same. You might not have hosted Ukrainian refugees or be in full understanding of what’s happening there but any money going into Russia is right now used for torture, rape and killing of Ukrainians.
I had a Kagi family subscription and immediately cancelled when I learnt about Vlad’s “it’s just some geopolitical opinions” stance. I also know others have done the same.
My wife is Ukrainian. I will leave it at that.
I have also a colleague from Afghanistan, for example, guess what their opinion is (and the list could be long, I just happen to have a colleague from there).
I remember Yandex being brought up during the Brave debacle, and I don’t remember them claiming anything of the sort. I think they simply stated the position that choosing search providers based on moral claims would simply lead to them being able to use only the niche search providers.
I’m sure she would find equivocating the US with Russia very reasonable
She doesn’t, but that’s my whole point: it’s a personal perspective. If you ask a person from Palestine, Vietnam, many places in South America, Yemen, Iraq, etc. their gripes would be different from my own, which as an Italian are different already from my wife’s etc.
So which moral claims do you accommodate? The obvious answer is everyone’s, by allowing each user to choose where indirectly give money. However this is apparently technically hard, so either you shut down or you simply decide that you can’t accommodate any, and make good in other areas (I.e. through privacy-preserving services).
Russian money is directly killing people now, and if people use false equivalence like “everyone bad” then the war keeps going
Russia should be shut off from the Western world
So does US one in Palestine. So does UAE, and many more. It’s not a matter of “everyone bad” is the fact that legitimately if the criteria is no paying anybody in a country that is involved in killing people, or that uses services from such a country, you reach everyone. And in this case it would be not using kagi directly as a US company.
The war in Ukraine is much closer to me, but if we are talking principles I need to understand that a person from Lebanon or Palestine, or other places might have different perspective and they would demand that “we don’t do business to X” has a different “X”. So to accommodate most or all of these perspectives, you need to necessarily include more countries, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not the only active war at the moment.
Vlad wrote it to me in their chat. Screenshot here: https://ioc.exchange/@troed/113311981054448887
Ask your wife whether she thinks people should send money to Russia. Now, Yandex is politically twisting the truth in their search results, but I care less about that than the fact that I’ll happily send money to Ukraine but there’s no way in hell I’m sending money to Russia.
Being a Kagi subscriber means you are. Morally - I’m not ok with it. In some nations it might even be against the law. Sanctions, you know. I’m not even sure Kagi is legally in the clear here.
I will give you more data points. I live in Estonia, and just now Estonia is disconnecting the power grid to Russia. It means that just by turning on my light, I might give (have given) some money to an actual Russian company. Let alone knowing which companies use Russian gas or other resources etc.
There are choices that personally make sense, I refused a job at a Yandex spinoff - israeli-russian company, for example. In this case the amount of money is so small, so indirect, that I personally accept the fact of giving money to Yandex - of which a small portion I assume ends in taxes and a portion of that ends up in weapons that will be used to kill Ukrainians is nothing different from buying a product that I am unaware was produced by a company which uses some Russian import. However, using kagi I can at least positively contribute to other aspects that for me are important in the world, like for example the protection of privacy. For this, I even accept to give money to Google and Microsoft, despite they are companies that made incalculable damages to society, and also pay (little) taxes and work directly with the US military, which means some money also ends up in weapons that are used to kill Palestinians (today).
Now, everyone has their own moral scale, so I completely understand if for someone this is unacceptable. That said, their technical reason why they don’t have an easy way for people to choose search backend is reasonable, and if we go to the point where they shouldn’t use X for moral reasons than they wouldn’t be able to use yandex, bing, google, brave (and maybe something else). In fact, using Kagi itself means paying taxes in US.
So to me their current approach is the only reasonable outcome. If for someone the tiny amount of indirect money is worse than the benefit (not personal, but collective) of fostering a healthy tech company, boost privacy etc. then they can reasonably make the decision to not pay for the service. Painting not doing so as “supporting Russia” though is disingenuous IMHO (I am saying in general).
Funny note, my wife also uses and loves Kagi, and not because she doesn’t care about the work or her family (who thankfully is in a safe-ish area).
Lots of western companies have divested from working with/in Russia even though it has cost them lots of money. Some because that’s a legal requirement (sanctions), some because it’s the right thing to do.
Not doing so is supporting Russia.
There are a ton of imports that are not (yet) sanctioned, and therefore tons of companies that did not divest.
As I mentioned, when possible or equivalent I absolutely support the choice. In this case, there are conflicting benefits and everyone can do their choices based on the way they value the different benefits.
This obviously can’t be an absolute moral argument, otherwise residing in US or Russia (or UAE, or China and many many more countries) would be immoral ipso facto, and same for buying any product made by any company in those countries. The globalized world makes this basically impossible.
Anyway, I feel we are going in circles now, so I will close it here.
Wait what? They did?
I just discovered they existed today so I’m pretty out of the loop on that topic.
I need per search pricing. Their plan includes way too many searches and is way too expensive. I use it like 2-3 times a month.
Do you use any other search engine?
Yes I use DDG which gives me similar results for most things. When I can’t find it there I go to Kagi. It has sometimes surprised me with much better results, but the cases are rare. I’d happily pay them 10 cents a search or something for those cases where I need to try it.
If I had your use case I’d cancel the while thing and only use their free plan, at this rate you’re covered for 9 months or so
Oh yeah, I’m never buying a subscription. I’m still on the trial, it’s been more than 6 months already. But I would pay them something for occasional use of their search engine if they’d let me do that.
