Convincing any one of those 50k people to ditch a free product for a paid one is a miracle by itself. Congrats to Kagi!
However, is there really no other model than these two, i.e. being 100% the product vs. paying the "full price" of the search?
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I didn’t ditch a “free” product. I ditched a product that I paid with my attention and time, which is something of the most valuable I have.
I've been using paid email (fastmail) for quite a long time and it's fine, I use it dozens or hundreds of times a day and it's around $4 a month. Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week (based on trying their free 100 queries) if subscribed. Otherwise Duckduckgo suffices. I'm satisfied with duckduckgo in a way that I could never be with any "free" email service since DDG doesn't require a signup and doesn't supply long term storage.
I was the same, but I didn't want to go back to DDG after the trial ended. It was that simple.
> Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week
Do people really use web search that little? According to the stats Kagi shows me, I make about 50-100 web searches every day on average.
wouldn’t this depend on the day? some days I hit 300+ but I’ve also had (many) days without a single search…
I use web search quite a lot, but most of the time DDG works fine for me. A handful of times per week, I'm unsatisfied with the DDG results for some particular query where I think Kagi might be better. So I'd check Kagi on those occasions if I had access. But meh, I don't need it that much.
We (partner and I) average between 700 and 900 searches a month.
Kagi has been so worth it.
Sure. Kagi could just start showing ads to subscribers who only want to pay half price. That awesome Netflix model.
AKA "The worst of both worlds"
TV channels were doing this for decades before Netflix did.
And newspapers and magazines. You pay for the magazine and you also get the ads inside.
I suspect the 'slippery slope' applies here
Advertising is a fungus. You let it into any part of your product and it’ll be everywhere before you know it.
I never understood why cryptomining never took off. The biggest issue I have with paying for anything on the internet is that I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go. If a service mines on a user’s machine, they just pay for it indirectly via their electric bill.
I guess the problem probably has to do with the value of the GPU cycles being lower than the served content. This is most apparent in the case of AI; e.g. if the mining lasts as long as the session, and the server runs 2 GPUs while the user is only running 1, then you can’t complete the “payment” unless the mining continues beyond the length of the session.
Look at the actual numbers. There‘s a large percentage of mobile users. Then there are users on laptops with iGPUs.
To crypto mine even 1 cent would take forever.
Now that the AI overlords demand more and more training data, maybe we will start "paying" by annotating some unit of information, aka Captcha-style.
You’re describing google.
Though training data sets based on private information about people are worth more to them, so they focus on that.
That lets them do things like run crooked ad auctions that screw websites and advertisers, intentionally worsen search results exactly enough to maximize profits, and other stuff that came out during their trial.
I understand your point. But in my hypothetical model, the paying entity (the customer) does not have an incentive in manipulating the search results, and the search is still optimised (only) for relevance to the user query.
Most users are on a batteried device. I'm not sure they're willing to pay in battery time and health.
>...I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go
That problem has been solved for anybody who wants it solved, through Apple Pay and Google Pay, or even the built-in feature in the browser for remembering credit cards.
Normal people absolutely would not accept websites hi-jacking their computer to mine crypto and hardware manufacturers like Apple would swiftly implement measures to protect users from those freaks.
How do you prove you've effectively tried mining, like the server asked you to?
Kagi gave me 300 free searches, then I got hooked.
Convincing? I was like Finally, a search engine! when Kagi appeared.
And no, there is only those 2 solutions.