Odd you say the price is steep - I have been using it mostly exclusively for a few months now and I haven't even thought about it cost. It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.
I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta testers will do more searches than average users, and I think that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see how they're going to avoid that.
That sounds unsettling, given the normal trajectory for software companies running at a loss (get VC, adjust goals to match VC desire, etc). For a privacy focused company it feels like they already lost the normal leverage line item of doing "something" with user data.
I dunno, "if you're not paying, you're the product", but how does that fit if you are paying, but what your paying isn't actually enough? Whats the other product?
I agree that it was an impressive product but couldn’t justify it based on the cost of living where I live and relative to other things I subscribe to (including my Fiber connection). I do hope things like this succeed.
Honestly there has to be something wrong with software pricing. Slack cost per user is similar to giving everyone in company sim card, while cell operators have to maintain both, massive physical infrastructure AND software infrastructure. Seems like most of SaaS environment is horribly inefficient.
