SEO and AI-generated clickbait have basically ruined most search engines. I’ve yet to find one that can really tackle this properly. I believe Kagi offers higher quality results but I can’t really verify that myself as I don’t have an account with them.

kagi seems very enticing to me, but man thats expensive... anyone here use it?

I have the $10/mo account but I’ll disagree with @[email protected] that it’s worth the money.

Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t go back to Google/DDG, but while I can afford Kagi’s monthly cost I don’t believe that everyone can, nor do I think it’s an appropriate cost for a search engine.

I feel like I am an average search user, and I easily burn through 1000 searches a month. I’ll possibly be upgrading to the $25/mo unlimited account.

If you’re used to doing conversion searches like “100 USD in EUR”, or “2.5g in oz”, or even “20 * 12%” - you get charged for each of those. That doesn’t seem so reasonable to me.

I understand if you can’t afford it. Money doesn’t grow on trees in this world. But Kagi has been very transparent about the reason for the costs - it’s what they need to charge to not lose money, since they don’t sell your user data or track you.

It’s unrealistic to think that having a search engine is free, and the reason Google is free is because it tracks you and sells your data to advertisers, and probably also makes sure you get search results that benefit those advertisers. It’s quite simply a bad choice to use an ad company to search the web.

They also had a blog post about search usage, where they used googles search statistics to determine that the average person searches 3 or 4 times per day (90 to 120 times per month). This amount (100 searches) is free on Kagi.

300 searches costs 5 dollars.

If you are doing 1000 searches per month, that’s as much as myself and I work as a programmer / devops guy. We search a lot. That’s much more than the average person. We are in the top 1% actually. Nice to be there for something right? :) Cost for us is 10 dollars.

I couldn’t find anything about your claim that conversion would cost extra, not on the pricing page and not in the FAQ section. I also did a few conversation searches and there was no info about additional price. Can you link to where it says that?

I couldn’t find anything about your claim that conversion would cost extra, not on the pricing page and not in the FAQ section. I also did a few conversation searches and there was no info about additional price. Can you link to where it says that?

Just look at your billing page and do a few of those searches. You will see they count as a paid search - nothing special you need to look for.

Kagi has been very transparent about the reason for the costs - it’s what they need to charge to not lose money, since they don’t sell your user data or track you.

I’ve seen their posts on this, but the question is how accurate that data is. 8 searches costing $1 doesn’t intuitively feel reasonable, but perhaps it is the truth.

Google’s search API is $1 per 200 queries: developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview#p…

Ah sorry, I misunderstood you. Yes they count as a search.

I don’t think you can compare pricing to Google. They make profits by combining any payment with selling your data for profit. There is no way Kagi can compete with that since they don’t sell your data.

To me, search is the most important thing I use the internet for. I don’t want Google to be my trusted search engine, that’s for sure. :)

To me, search is the most important thing I use the internet for

I like this framing. That might help me come to terms with their cost 👍

It’s honestly why I’m paying for it.

I also pay for email for the same reason. :)

Me too. That’s probably the easiest comparison and one of the reasons I struggle with Kagi’s pricing. I get Proton’s highest paid plan for less cost… and that includes all their products, mail, VPN, 3TB cloud storage, and clearly doesn’t sell any of my data since they don’t have any access to it.