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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

I have the same issue. If I'm paying 0.005$ for every search, I would stop searching because of the mental effort to optimize everything.

One alternative that could work, is to make a subscription service, and then reimburse the unused amount.

Like make people pay 20$/month, then do your micropayment system in the background, by the end of the month, refund them to difference if they didn't exceed that monthly value.

It creates a positive feeling instead of a constant background stress with every interaction.

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Interesting to hear about how micro-payments would make you two feel.

This is indeed the theoretical expectation I had regarding micro-payments, but I was positively surprised to find out that I didn't care at all and in the end, I'm always positively surprised by the GPT-3 bill (I got much more value out of it than they charged me).

This does seem very likely to vary by person. I'm very much saying this from the perspective of "for my own sake, I hope this doesn't become the standard", rather than "this will never happen because everyone's brain is like my brain". I've made my share of blatantly wrong predictions based on the latter :)

If the level of a bill surprises you, you are financially irresponsible. That just doesn't gel with an adult beyond a certain age (barring some outliers), which is probably what you are seeing above.

I mentioned the same for me during the kagi search engine pricing discussions. Slight overpaying is fine, but paying per search would instantly create an illogical chilling effect for me.

Totally agree - I think the main issue with Kagi is that although they have clearly built out the service and are offering it for free at the moment, their premise that people will actually micropay for a search hasn't been tested yet.

It's easy to get users if you offer a paid service for free, but much more difficult to get people to pay for it.

(They have done surveys where people have said they would pay, but this is different to actually putting their credit card in and putting their money where their mouths are!)

To be fair, me and a bunch of other people are wondering why we still can’t pay ;) I’m perfectly happy with it and what I’d get for my $10-$20.

Hehe, I don't doubt that you will pay :)

I just also think there will be a non-zero proportion of people who absolutely promise and intend to pay, then won't put their credit card details in.

I also think there is a non-zero proportion of people who will search differently/less when every search costs them money!

I'm getting tired of all these monthly subscriptions that cost me $7-20 no matter of usage. Premium podcasts feet's, video streaming, Spotify. It's becoming a very real cost and mentally I'm bucketing it all together. Are others not getting subscription fatigue?

Edit: similarity, when I'm building a side project now O avoid everything with a fixed cost as much as possible. $5/month for a relational DB? nope, let's see how I can store data and only pay for storage and access.

Your other option for Kagi will be to pay-per-use (with pre-paid credits).

I don’t have that many subscriptions, so I’m not getting any fatigue ;)

I hope they don't listen to you, because paying per use is the best option and you can just get over it.

If they have a monthly fee I'll hesitate since if I reduce my usage for a unspecified while I'll never know if I should cancel it or not. It requires being able to predict the future, which is a cognitive cost I can't overcome.

Don’t worry, there are both camps in the discord. So there’ll probably be pre-paid credits as well as subscriptions.

Or you could just stop thinking about it. Especially because your subscription + refund would cost you exactly the same. You may want to set a cap on searches to 20$ per month.

I used to optimise things excessively (eg. when grocery shopping, phone spending pay as you go) - then I stopped when I realised it's not worth the effort compared to what I make in a day.

This is Proof of Stake.

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