Let me preface this by saying I realize this is me being 100% self-indulgent. Just getting it off my chest before I simply leave, and no one is forced to read or consider this.
Today, I and my wife cease to be your customers. We've been using Kagi for about 4 months. The pricing in dollars is bit steep, but I really liked the company's mission of humanizing the web, and reading Cory Doctorow's sterling recommendation of Kagi made me really want to believe in this company. We each pay for a starter plan, because duo would be too steep for us in Brazil and we're not exactly swimming in disposable income.
Instead, what I found is a company that sells better search, but is actually just horny about AI. The search has been consistently better than Google, but I've noticed that the quality of search results began to not exactly dip but vary in quality from time to time, especially if it's not specifically in English. That alone wouldn't be enough for me to pull the plug on a service with Kagi's stated values and that is offering better search than Google either way, but I'm officially done justifying spending my money on a company that refuses to follow its own mission statement by drowning its service with AI bloatware.
Several users consistently asked for no AI options, be it either with an AI-less plan or a killswitch. You refuse to provide either. And I say refuse, because I'm sure you could make a single setting for those who want it, and yet you don't. You pedantly relativize how such a setting would create made up problems, constantly saying it's all opt-in, and ignoring the fact that many people come to Kagi specifically to get away from LLMs hallucinating and being inserted into every product only to find every update being about Kagi Assistant, having a Kagi Summarize button added to the quick menu of your browser and having to remember to not place a question mark on your search so that the freaking assistant won't show you an inferred and likely wrong response for your queary.
Meanwhile, you're adding image generation to your assistant. How is that in any way, shape or form related to search or humanizing the web? And don't even get me started on the absolute aberration that's Kagi News, a news summarizer that your CEO earnestly believes is capable of "unbiasing" news, despite summarizing from biased sources (no such thing as apolitical reporting, guys, sorry) and routinely getting key stuff wrong or out of context, because of course, it's an LLM.
Heck, even your think-pieces about the state of search make a point to specifically say you are fighting for the "future of search and AI". Jesus Christ, please, just own up to the fact you're basically an AI company that happens to also offer search already instead of tricking people into believing the opposite.
You know what did it for me? It wasn't that you refused to implement a simple feature that's widely asked. It wasn't the members of this forum and your own CEO being vaguely condescending about it. It was my wife, someone who's not tech savvy, getting a crappy Kagi Assistant answer because she made a search in the form of a question (you know, the extremely common and default way most people use Google) and didn't know that would trigger your chatbot.
I don't care about your responsible AI manifesto. I don't care your pricing technically doesn't charge extra for AI features unless you burn tokens, and I don't care if you think adding it provides more value to my subscription. I don't care that you don't have VC money, as if that forces you to also make a bunch of AI stuff and an email service for some reason.
You sell a thing, provide a bunch of extras in bundles I didn't ask for and once faced with a clear demand form a subset of users you could very realisticaly acquiesce, you just... don't do it, and then you tell your customers to just not engage with it.
That's precisely the thing I hoped Kagi wasn't: another tech startup that believes it knows better than its own customers. If I'm going to be annoyed by a product I use everyday and that I don't trust, I might as well choose the one that doesn't charge me a premium.
If you ever provide a way for me to really, trully, not have to deal with LLM crap, I might come back. But then again, who cares? As always, a customer can only really shrug and walk away.
