Hacker News Reader

Comment by araoz | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.

View on HN

There's a $10 plan with no AI.

No there isn't.

https://kagi.com/pricing

I guess they added a few Assistant searches to the $10 plan and kept the price the same. You don’t have to use it. There’s no AI in regular search. You have to go out of your way to use AI features. Those used to belong to the $25 plan.

> You don't have to use it.

The whole point of this comment chain is about not wanting to pay for access to something that they don't want. I've been subscribed to Kagi Ultimate for years now, but I totally get what they're saying. Having a "search only" subscription would be interesting, and probably boosted adoption a non-trivial amount.

The $10 plan was always $10. They didn’t increase the price when they essentially included an Assistant trial. It’s not like they could remove that and make the $10 plan cheaper. They also offer a $5 plan now with fewer searches. The people complaining are cheapskates who don’t want to pay for anything. No matter what the price is they will argue it should be lower.

You're saying you'd love to use Kagi at $7/month, but flatly refuse to do so at $10/month, which is what their unlimited Professional option costs? Really?

FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.

We can haggle over the ideal price but I do see sense in a cheaper version without the AI to appeal to more cost conscious people - I am a Kagi subscriber I never use the AI part (but I'm not so bothered that I'd demand a discount, maybe others are)

I didn't use the AI and would have preferred a subscription without it. I ended up canceling anyway.

Same, I don't want to use AI, and I don't want to support it financially. Won't be subscribing unless they introduce a plan without AI.

Same here. It's not a big difference but that's what you get when you're right at the cut-off point. At $10/month, I find it hard to justify switching from duckduckgo when the results are not noticeably better (I've tried). And as someone who's online a lot, I'd be out of queries in a not-so-extraordinary month on the smaller plan (I've tried). Adding 20% to the smaller plan (in queries and in price) would make more sense for me than going for "unlimited" at twice the price (just quote me a price per query please, it's not as if each additional query costs you nothing)

There are also real downsides, like needing to be logged in all the time. I can visit ddg.gg on a customer's laptop in 0.2s, but won't be logging into my Kagi to do a quick web search

I also don't need anything but search and image search: for maps I use OSM, for LLM inference there are various free and paid providers, for videos one sadly doesn't find much outside of youtube anyhow (save for specific genres like conference talks at media.ccc.de, in which case I already know where to go). All this stuff included in the ultra fancy plus version incurs costs for them so it makes sense that it's not in the base product, but I won't use it so I feel silly paying for it

I'd love if they did a bundle deal with other service providers like email and data storage.

https://kagi.com/specials

Same here, I like Kagi but I'm not paying that much for search. I tried it for a while but it was not worth the money over DDG for me.

I'm very cost conscious for services though. I wouldn't pay more than €3 a month or so. Being in a medium wage eu country I just don't want money flying or left right and center.

For comparison i pay €2 a month for my email, online storage and web office, EU based also.

+1. I'm no market researcher but my activation energy for deciding to spend on a commodity like search is < 3€ / $3 a month, otherwise I don't bother and just find another way.

I don't get it. They do have a $5/month plan.

If you can find at least one other person you care about a little, then they do in fact offer unlimited for $7 or even $3.33

I use the 2-person plan with my wife which is unlimited for $14/2.

There is also a family plan which is unlimited for $20/6.

I don't see the problem. Even for a single person $7 is worth it but $10 is just too much? Eh, maybe. If they hadn't come out with the duo option I'm not sure what I would have done myself.

I actually agree about the AI. Pick almost any estimated value/cost you want for the AI and let me remove that and I would like to.

But $14/2 has been good enough to just ignore the AI and only be a little annoyed I'm helping pay for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com