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I don't want them to fail but I have 0 support for Kagi after trying them out. Main reason is they collect PII and have no privacy friendly payment options. They should have gone the way if Mullvad with that. Another reason is requiring an account for search is begging to be tracked but even if that is not an issue, it is sooo annoying having to sign in to search and even more annoying when auto complete for a search takes me to kagi but I no longer have that account so I have to face a login page and then navigate away and redo the search.

They made the critical mistake of not keeping it simple. If they wanted profits, why make it hard for people to pay them? If they wanted market share, why not have a free tier so people can try before they buy. They're only staying afloat in tech-circle hype imo.




Kagi does not collect PII. You can register with a fake email if you want to. Payment information (if any) is collected by Stripe, not Kagi.

How would you keep it simple while running a paid search service with non-trivial search cost?


As someone with high privacy focus, just having a user id given by stripe, that stripe then can connect to a real person is a liability. Mullvad allows payments in crypto and their site is accessible as an onion service. I know it definitely adds overhead to do both of those things, though personally I wouldn't mind paying a lot of extra for it. I'm not sure which fraction of users are like me though, I might just be an unviable customer


Sure, but also note that it took 14 years for Mullvad to reach the point where it can support all those billing methods. Kagi launched less than a year ago with a small bootstrapped team, building a much more complex product.


Kagi can listen to its users and learn from other pro-privacy companies. Imagine if proton requires a paid account for everything for everyone.




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