Kagi Search Changelog
kagi.com
Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.

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.

  • aaron@lemm.eeEnglish
    1840·
    18 days ago

    We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users

    Eh, ok. This is a good user retention strategy if your product isn’t interesting enough to use for most users. Can you imagine any other product offering a free month if you didn’t use it for a whole month? Kagi is near death.

    edit: downvoters have six-to-eight figure salaries at Kagi

    edit 2: Kagi sent out an email to its 15 staff to downvote my comment on its grassroots marketing plot

    • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
      161·
      18 days ago

      The user growth has been bigger than usual in the last months, they have live stats. Not to say they were breaking even at around 25k users, they now have 38k.

      Also their product shouldn’t be interesting, should be invisible. It’s a search engine, not a toy.

      If you really want to see malice, I would say it’s more of a marketing move because very very few users will not make any search at all in a month. And those users have indeed no cost for them. Giving them credit still means you are getting the money eventually.

      • aaron@lemm.eeEnglish
        412·
        18 days ago

        Sorry, I use a search engine about 300 times a month at minimum. I’m not what you’d consider a power user right now. I agree it shouldn’t be interesting, but it should be used at least. How many figures are you earning?

        • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
          52·
          18 days ago

          You said “if your product is not interesting enough for users to use”.

          The product has to be useful, and the user growth for a obviously premium service I think is a good testimony of that.

          Have you considered that they might be a healthy business that doesn’t bleed money (like most tech companies) and therefore doesn’t need to rely on trapping users in subscriptions hoping they won’t use the product?

          Also what’s with the passive aggressive tone? We are talking about a search engine, chill.

          • aaron@lemm.eeEnglish
            25·
            18 days ago

            I’m fine. I feel like I’m arguing with a secret Kagi operative here.

            I haven’t considered that they might be a healthy business but you seem to know a lot more than I do about it…

            Please, keep sharing what you don’t know about Kagi

            • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
              4·
              18 days ago

              I am repeating data points they shared during the community event.

              BTW buddy, you can cool it with the passive-aggressiveness. Not everyone on the internet is out to get you.

              The info about them breaking even at 25k was shared in the discord channel (which I very rarely look). The rest are stats that are published on their website and as I said shared during the yearly community event.

              I work in tech, and I would be blind to not acknowledge that a company which:

              • is profitable/breaks even after few years of operation
              • does that with 25k users
              • doesn’t have a marketing budget (used to, now they might have a ridiculously small one).

              Might be a healthy business, different from 99% of tech companies that generally bleed money even with millions of users.

              You seem completely sure of the opposite, whatever, don’t use their service lol

              • devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                18 days ago

                Kind cool to see a profitable company like that. I worked on a place that for years was burning millions of dollars every month in hopes of eventually making it work out 😄

    • Shortstack@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      I pay for kagi because it’s genuinely less frustrating to use than searxng, duckduckgo, bing, and whatever shit Google is up to these days.

      They’re fine search engines but after years of using them I found they annoyed me sometimes; their limitations will surface if you use them long enough. In contrast, I haven’t ran into a kagi search results page yet that has annoyed me by not finding what I expected to see.

      The problem is that Google was good for a long time and then that became the bar everything is measured against. None of the free ones I tried came as close to that Google-like search from the before times as this paid service does.

    • troed@fedia.io
      31·
      18 days ago

      FWIW - most mobile data plans roll over if you don’t use them fully during the month.

      (at least where I live)

      • aaron@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        18 days ago

        Kagi is rolling this out to people who never use their service. So that would be equivalent to you paying your mobile provider and never making a phone call or text for an entire month.