Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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We have to pay for the services we use somehow. I'd rather it be cash than the details of my entire life. But the money to operate those services has to come from somewhere
That's fair, but I think they're charging too much.
Bitwarden stores my passwords, and they only ask $10/year for their "advanced" plan, and i use them almost as much as search. Mullvad VPN is privacy respecting and costs $5/month for unlimited usage.
I understand search is more compute intensive than password storage, and more R&D intensive than a VPN, but $10/month is a hard pill to swallow for that service. I could see $10/month for a combined search, VPN, TOTP, and password storage service, but just search doesn't feel like enough for that cost. Also, I have no guarantees aside from their word that they're not selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I might be more interested.
If this page is accurate, DuckDuckGo makes $0.0027/search, so if we directly converted that to Kagi's 300 searches/month, it would take 1850 searches for DDG to get the same revenue (Kagi essentially charges $0.0166/search at the $5/month plan). I know they're not directly comparable because of how they work (I don't think DDG has its own search model), I just think they're overcharging, especially since Kagi doesn't advertise (DDG absolutely does). I wish I could just pay per search. I think $0.01/search is more than fair since it's ~4x higher than DDG to account for dev efforts, and I'd like to see that go down as usership goes up. That's a ~33% discount vs the 300 search plan (which I doubt many get full use of), and it's transparent pricing. They could add prepayment or subscription discounts on top.
Interesting, it looks like they're only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they'll be able to drop prices.
I wish they'd combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I'd already be a customer. But it's just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I'd seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn't attractive at current prices.
I'll certainly check back once they've matured a bit, but I'm not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn't ideal.
Careful! That's dangerously close to expressing an understanding of nuance on the Internet! /s