I like what Kagi are doing, even though I don't pay for their search engine. I've been enjoying browsing the Kagi Small Web portal recently.

It’s too bad they require a subscription. I’ll never use this shit for this reason alone.

I’d pay for it if their $5 a month tier wasn’t so limited

No one should have to pay to search the web. They’re as bad as all the other monetized bullshit.

It costs money to maintain software?

They have a free tier with 100 searches! It doesn't sound like a lot but I usually don't cross it.

Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube? Two and a half minutes of commercials every 8 minutes on streaming services? Unblockable ads on websites?

I crossed it in a few days. Some people use the web pretty heavily.

I'd pay if it wasn't based in the US.

I would pay, for my personal use. But a lot of the time I’m on my company corp network, on a company device. And I don’t mix that with my personal logins and personal devices.

No, but if you DON'T want ads then they need to get money from somewhere?

I RARELY use YouTube

That's fucking awesome but the ranking is highly questionable.

I searched myself and a 4 upvote comment was the top thing.

Fair point.

Petition your IT for a subscription. Worst they can say is no right?

I block all ads from all sites on the internet.

I pay money to the fediverse hosting foundation because hosting software costs money. I pay creators to create content because creating content costs them time and if they are going to do that thing, they need money.

This attitude is why the internet is full of ads. Doing shit for free doesn't happen on an empty stomach. I'd rather pay a fair price for software and services I use. I'm not saying anyone's pricing is fair, just pointing out I don't agree with this behavior.

Im okay with it tbh. The everything must be free on the internet mindset is what led ads working its way in everywhere.

I’m guessing you haven’t worked for a big company before.

Naah. People actually paying for the subscription what drives it. YouTube was ad free backing the day. And when they allowed adds. It was intentionally to create an annoyance that they cooked profit from- so that when they offered a add free, they could ALSO profit from.

A one time fee, I understand. A monthly rate to use a web browser is shameful.

“Just use chatGPT.” -IT

Youtube also didn't have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.

Now to be clear, I don't pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that's more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.

That's not new. They've had it for a long time now.

I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention

Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That's how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.

This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It's the standard play book.

One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user's usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.

A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it's too risky and you're most likely losing money.

This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.

Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That's what's actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.

Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that's how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I'm not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn't try to take advantage of me and my data.

I would have expected plenty of results from lemmynsfw given your username.

Ahh. So you’re fine with all the ads on YouTube?

No, that’s why I pay for YouTube too. If I wouldn’t use it as much that the price is worth it, I would likely not use it at all (besides the irregular link thrown over my fence ever once in a while).

The $5 a month tier is more than enough for me; I don't think I've gone over the 300 queries a month in almost a year, and I feel like I search a lot. Those couple of times I have, all it means is starting a new 30 day period a little early. It's painless.

I definitley search a lot in that case; I tried it for a few months and I think I hit the 300 cap after three weeks each month.

Same tbf. 5$ for 300 searches is so limited. I just checked my DDG history for the month and I average between 2500 and 3500 searches a month. I don't even use it professionally, its just general consumer use.

Honestly I likely would pay for it if it was 5$ for 3k-4k searches. I would just swap to another engine for the remainder but, 1$/1k searches up to 10$ which moves to unlimited would be more than fine, even if they decided to remove the bloat like lens, and translation from the package. but they are likely hoping more people are not like me and will just pay the 10$ a month to have unlimited rather than just not use the service at all.

Especially considering how many other services that I get way more value of are not much more than the unlimited plan... I can have internet browsing for 10$ which i already have for free, or I can pay a couple $'s more and get a streaming service or a news site which contains content that I don't already have access to.

I like the mentality but, it's just not worth it for me for a non-essential service that adds nothing of value to me outside one less site harvesting my data.

That's because 4 upvotes here is like 4k upvotes on that other site.

You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing, online service?? I'm a fucking communist, please don't make me defend capitalism...

Even back in the day, people would buy versions of software on disks and updates were limited. There's a reason why the idea of perpetual licenses died hard and fast and every company everywhere either reneged or died.

I pay for Kagi. If they offered a "one-time lifetime purchase" I'd probably just stop because that would be a giant red flashing neon warning sign.

Does this mean it's effectively $0.0167 per search, and you have to buy batches of 300 searches, but they have an expiration date?

Sick

You’re why there are ads.

the free tier is a static 100 not a monthly 100 isn't it?

The pricing page says limited to 100 total searches and 100 AI interactions with standard models. I read that as once you hit your total 100 you need to get a sub.

The page isn't super clear but older update logs state they moved from a "monthly 50" to a "one time 100"

Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That's 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.

You're doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.

Why so many searches?

Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.

Quick question, how were you planning to cover costs?

tl;dr: you're paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I'd rather be paying directly than use a "free" service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.

No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.

In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn't scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.

Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.

Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that's a different conversation).

300 searches is ten per day, they aren't that many. Most days I think I'd do less than that but then there are days that I'm looking for something specific and might do many times that.

It is definitely not something to use instead of bookmarks like most people use google.

Aaah! So you weren’t around when YouTube was add-free for over a decade.

EDIT: it’s amazing how many people flock to defend the monetizing of YouTube and how they run their shit, yet so many people whine about how they monetized.

I wonder if they’re the same people.

I Kagi's case they are paying per search to connect to APIs to search other search engines and aggregate the results. They have a very real cost per search that isn't only maintaining software.

Wouldn't that be part of the "maintenance" cost? If I run an ice cream cart, I need to keep purchasing supplies to keep selling ice cream.

You can easily selfhost a portal like that with wander or try one of these linked wander consoles.

I hit about 1,250 searches per month on average. I once did 2K in a month.

Probably a good number of those are refinements on an initial search query. Like if I search for a movie title, but there are multiple that go by the same name, I'll append the year the one I care about came out. Doing that it's easy to get like 3–6 searches in a single minute.

It ran at a financial loss every year until more recently.

Over a decade of running at a loss. That is only possible for companies, like Google, that are already very rich.

Costs that they’re now paying for with ads and subscriptions. So I’ll ask again. What would you do differently?

is it really that much? I search a lot about my current desktop, and some about my proxmox server. I also like to search about ongoing tech trends like currently ive done a lot of research on the current ps5 jailbreak.

I just went and checked my current month usage at the moment and You are right though with the average. For this month so far I'm sitting at 2209 searches, my daily range is 28-308 queries (if I search "duckduckgo" as the keyword) the majority of them are in the 40-90 query range. A good chunk of them falls into gaming questions and linux questions.

for fun I just checked septembers, page total is 2627 queries and ranges between 40 and 167 pages a day with an average of 87.56 a day

august is 2445 with range of 29-189 and an average 78.87

Same. If ecosia or qwant had subscriptions I'd probably pay for at least one of them.

Uruki presents itself as a European alternative to Kagi. They seem to have a different vision, however (no AI and just focused on a search engine).
On the other hand, I didn’t try because I find the price a bit high for the little comfort it brings me, but it’s still good to test!

About Uruky