Comment by alexruf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexruf | Hacker News Reader

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Having a low entry is very important to get new users on board. But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway). This makes the standard plan absolutely unattractive even for non-tech-savvy professionals. But the professional plan also only offers 700 searches for $10.

Personally, I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches. Otherwise I don't know if I can judge $10 per month for a premium search engine whose service will not even last me for a whole month.

Don't get me wrong. I love the product and would be happy to pay for it, but your current pricing plans are just not very convincing to me and do not fit most peoples needs. Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.

Thanks for constructive feedback.

> But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly

They will not, a 'normal' user searches only 100 times a month.

> (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway

Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.

> I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches

We will. Pricing is not a matter of our mood though, but of economics, and once you remove advertisers from the equation the true cost of search surfaces. We were able to bring it down to just 1.5 cents per search.

> Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.

Isn't something you use every day, tens if not hundreds times a day, and helps you accomplish important stuff, in a more productive way worth the $25/mo then?

> Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.

I really wish it would be that way. But from my personal experience non-tech affine people don’t care about privacy or ads that much (as long as it’s free). Just take my wife and father-in-law as an example: They have Google as their startpage in the browser. And instead of directly typing the URL into the browser bar, they will always do a search for it. I told them so many times, but they literally don’t care. And they are not completely wrong since it works for them. 99% of the time Google will return what they are looking for within the first result. No chance I can convince them to suddenly pay $5-10 for the same thing.

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