> I guess this pricing isn't meant to countries outside of the US.

Their issue is, that they pay the same to Google and Microsoft, no matter where the user searches from :/

Have you ever tried counting your searches? You may be surprised. I'm slightly above the 500/month.

Not the OP but I just checked my 3 months history and I'm at 800, 469, and 682 searches on DuckDuckGo and 466, 535, and 482 on Google. I feel like I'm a heavy search engine user and I'd have guessed more than this.

I'm considering paying for Kagi but the price seems a bit high, especially considering that I replaced some of my searches with ChatGPT and I pay much less for using the API of OpenAI. But maybe their API price is not sustainable.

For $5 or $10 per month I'd prefer to self-host a search engine and a language model on a server I own.

I completely agree with the fact that not everyone can afford paying for Kagi. However, I seem to read from a lot of people who could afford it, but find it too expensive.

The thing is that searches have a price. If Google makes it free, that's because they make money from the data they gather, right? And probably the data is worth more than people guess. Maybe Kagi would be able to be cheaper if it had more users (some kind of economy of scale), but in the meantime, that's the only alternative I see.

So I'm ready to pay for it now to help prove that it is viable to ask people to pay for their product. Because I can afford it.

I'm approximately in the 900-1100/month range.

Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.

Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.

Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.

My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.

This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.

I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...

I agree with the anxiety, that's also something I hate with clouds (AWS and similar). Though for Kagi it's counting my searches, so it's not like a bot on the other side of the world will raise my bill.

For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".

You can do that with Kagi, there is both a soft limit and hard limit you can set. Although we would like to go towards the future with no limits as soon as economics allow it.

Actually I just saw this suggestion which I think is very nice: https://kagifeedback.org/d/512-automatically-redirect-search...

The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.

Wouldn't that make sense?

Oh I did not know that. I have the "legacy premium" (not sure if that's the right name) left for a few months, I guess I'll see that when I transition to the newer pricing plan.

But it's great that Kagi has that feature!

I personally have 519 in the last 30 days just on my work PC. I search way more at home, so I'd estimate that I do at least 1000 per month in total. And this is not counting the searches I do on my phone either.

If your browser tries to prefetch search results from the address or search bar then it might add up very, very quickly.

AFAICT Chrome (and hence other Chromium browsers) don't do this, and if you auto complete straight to a result from your history that doesn't count as a search engine hit either.

I'm a heavy search user with Kagi on both mobile and desktop, and I've never even come close to 1000 searches/mo. YMMV.