Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...
I agree with the anxiety, that's also something I hate with clouds (AWS and similar). Though for Kagi it's counting my searches, so it's not like a bot on the other side of the world will raise my bill.
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
You can do that with Kagi, there is both a soft limit and hard limit you can set. Although we would like to go towards the future with no limits as soon as economics allow it.
The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.
Oh I did not know that. I have the "legacy premium" (not sure if that's the right name) left for a few months, I guess I'll see that when I transition to the newer pricing plan.
Based on their existing pricing at the $10 plan, that's 700 searches plus up to 400 searches at 15c / search.
Total is ~$16 / month depending on how many searches I make. The unlimited plan is appealing, but I'm convinced paying something in the range of $16-$25 a month ($192 - $300 / year, or $163 - $255 / year with their 15% annual discount) is still a steep price.
Sure - search is valuable, and ~$160 / year could work for me, but the variable nature of the cost is off-putting. Part of the issue is the per-search unit pricing: why can't I pay up-front like in the unlimited plan for a whole year, at the benefit of a slight discount? As someone who does pay for SaaS plans and is willing, I'm not excited about surprise monthly bills as an individual user.
My advice to Kagi would be to find a way to do annual billing without resorting to such fine-grained unit pricing. Charge per every 100 searches instead of 15c/search (e.g. charge $1.25 for 100 /extra/ searches on top of whatever plan I'm on), and have a rollover period (e.g. two months) if I purchase an extra 100 searches but only use e.g. 20 of them.
This kind of billing (annual discount for all plans + broader unit pricing) would reduce the price shock and anxiety of worrying about how much a single search costs.
I think Kagi can be an interesting product, and even one I probably will pay for, but the amount of thought into their current pricing seems naive from my view...