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Comment by teecha | Hacker News Reader

Could Kagi Ultimate be a good replacement for ChatGPT? A subscription there would save me some money if it was similar.

Just recently started paying for Kagi search and quite love it.

Mostly depends on which features are most important for you. I'm a SWE, so using their Assistant for Web RAG nearly exclusively for work-related stuff and for most of my personal queries. I'm rarely using multi-modal content, mostly sticking to text. They support many providers and new notable models are typically rolled out only a few days after release which is always great to test out. I have a standalone subscription for coding agent LLM. If above aligns - might be a good choice.

I do a lot of help with spreadsheets and some ongoing threads in ChatGPT.

I’m an Assistant Principal so use it to help me get better with spreadsheets, churn through complex formulas, and some other miscellaneous tasks for feedback and assistance. Definitely use a lot of screenshots of things to also help consume info in there.

I think I might be stuck with both for a while as I’m not sure Kagi can quite fill this gap yet.

I use regular Kagi assistant for most of my questions. I use Openrouter chat to chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT 5 at the same time and continue only the productive conversation. My OR account is for my coding agent and its completely pay as you go, no fixed monthly costs.

I’ve stuck with chatgpt and do dump screenshots, spreadsheets, etc. in there with some regularity. Screenshots are mostly for convenience and spreadsheets when I’m still stuck on something. Didn’t even think about loading in different things. I can see potential for this in the future but I’ve been with ChatGPT for so long exactly because it does so well with accepting files to work with.

Do you use it regularly (20 min a day or so)? If so, how is your monthly consumption - does it beat the subscription costs for either service?

I don’t use 20 minutes a day or so. It is more like I don’t use it a ton and then tend to go through periods where I might lean on it a lot. This is why I feel like it is tough to make the call.

I guess I should also explore how capable the free version is at this point, too.

That’s what I did and I’m pretty happy with it. I just fall back to something free on the rare occasion I want an image generated (tbh, mostly emojis of my dog).

Mostly, yes.

You have a spend limit, but the assistant has dozens of of models

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