If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users. Not to mention, as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).
> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.
"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.
... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Obvioulsy the TYPE and RETURNS of some cost.
>These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.
50 searches from the web feel way more generous to a user than using the agent (most wont even hit them), hitting the 50 cap in like 10 minutes, and being negative about the whole experience.
>... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.
Which is exactly why it wouldn't work well for API use with such cap.
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
Defeats the purpose of the free tier.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.
It's the people downloading open weight models and running OpenClaw (or this month's trend) who don't care how many tokens it takes because it only costs them electricity.
Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.
It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.
Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.
I refuse to believe there is a negligible margin decrease for agents using the regular search budget. Searching is cheap.
That’s a bad business decision in the same way it would be a bad business decision for Netflix to re-enable infinite account sharing.
Right now, API usage is only available using a PAYG credit system, even if you've already got a subscription. But giving subscription users an allotment of free credits that covers light API usage would be nice - I could plug it into my agent of choice for casual chats or exploration, while still having to buy credits for more extreme or production usage.
e.g. if you expect the average user to use 50% of the search quota / month through the UI, but 100% through the API, then you make the quota shared between the two but double the effect of usage from the API.
Especially if the API induces demand.
(Don't shoot the messenger, just trying to explain why it makes sense that they're not doing this)
[1] Meaning, they are more satisfied with an 'unlimited' or just way-more-than-you'll-ever-need option, even when it costs them more when averaged over even a few months. I'm not saying this makes you an irrational person -- I have the same illogical feelings myself.
This is why unlimited or at least a service stop instead of overage is highly preferable. It's the reason I only use prepaid mobile plans too so they can never overcharge me (and it's cheaper than a contract too)
I'm imagining rate limits that would prevent the user from making many more API calls than they would have made searches anyway. If you want unlimited 24/7 searches, you can pay for the credits directly, but if you just want to partially replace your existing search habits with e.g. interactive agent sessions, then that would be fine.
A more specific example would be how Anthropic allow certain Claude subscriptions to get free API credits, with some restrictions on the age of the account and with the number of credits being limited.
I think there is a workable solution here, although I can imagine that figuring out the details (how many credits to offer, what sort of limits, how to price the whole thing, etc) is complicated enough that Kagi have decided it's not worth the effort for the small number of users for whom this feature would be useful. And generally I'm very satisfied with Kagi, so I'm not complaining here or trying to suggest that this is something that they should be expected to offer. It would just be nice!
A bit off-topic, but when I signed up for Kagi, I naturally became more aware of how many times I use search on the internet, since I didn't want to run into the limit for my tier.
I assumed I was a heavy search user, but now that I watch myself, I'm really surprised how little I actually search anymore. I thought it might be a hundred times a day. In reality, it's closer to four or five times a day.
I don't know if it's my changing habits; or the fact that much of the information on the internet has become siloed, so I know where to go without wandering around; or some other factor.
I was just really surprised.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
Weaker on actual search features though
I also see a lot less value from my Kagi subscription like the grandparent post than I did before agentic search. I’ve been wondering if I should just drop it in favor of DDG; allowing me to use some search via api would change that for me.
You're paying ten bucks a month for access to Kagi the web search, not Kagi the search API. If you want them to provide that service and scale it accordingly it makes sense for that to be a separate feature with a separate price.
The big difference is that API usage can be scaled up way quicker than web page hits and scraping can be, which is an understandable concern if you're trying to price your service for human usage and not for bots hammering away as fast as they can. But judicious use of rate limits could help here - have a subscribers API tier that allows only a relatively low volume of calls and do standard API pricing for all requests beyond that.
That said, I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing that make this easier to say than to do.
I suspect Kagi would actually make more money by including a small recurring API allowance with existing subscriptions. The value ain't really in giving away searches, it's getting people to integrate Kagi into their existing agentic workflows.
Once someone starts relying on Kagi for their agents, they're much more likely to exceed that allowance and pay for additional usage. That seems like a better long-term revenue strategy than trying to convince people to pay separately for API access before they've even built anything around it.
Brave and Perplexity seem to understand this. A small included allowance is a much more effective customer acquisition and retention tool than keeping API usage entirely separate.