Kagi Assistant standalone subscription

kray

Great point by @Pleonasm, I agree with the part about competitive comparison with existing products. I have OpenWebUI + OpenRouter API setup as compensation when Kagi Assistant cannot perform in a way I want it. As a simple example, Kagi Assistant only allow top_p parameter adjustment, while in OpenWebUI any parameter can be used, including top_k and min_p, as well as the option to bypass embedding and retrieval for documents, which was a major issue for Kagi Assistant, see: #6801. It is also annoying when I get to experience newer models with OpenRouter API before Kagi Assistant, when in fact I paid more to Kagi as a product. Adding on, I read somewhere that the official Kagi Search API is about move out of beta soon, which makes it easily available to integrate Kagi Search API into OpenWebUI, or any sort of Chat UI for LLM. This makes the value of Kagi Assistant drop further, even without the separation of Kagi Assistant from existing plan. However, this is just a viewpoint of someone who is willing to fiddle with self hosting and pay for API, which is not a representation of the general users.

CanadianUser73

Luis We know there are Starter and Professional subscribers who find utility in the Kagi Assistant but haven't upgraded to Ultimate, and we'd love to understand why. What would make the upgrade worth it for you? If you're using another tool, what's missing from Kagi Assistant to justify you going through the pain of switching?

Because I find using Kagi assistant with the latest open weight models gives great results for casual research and fact finding. Especially the way it cites stuff, it’s brilliant. I use it as a way to search for information and then decide which source site to go for details. Please don’t ever change this. I love how good the models are at making search queries.

Why I haven’t upgraded to ultimate — I already use Claude / ChatGPT etc for work, so I’m more familiar with those tools. For my personal LLM usage, i don’t want to pay a Claude sub AND a Kagi Ult sub. To put it another way, I’m putting Kagi ult up against the base plans from the LLM providers (ChatGPT Plus). I guess I have a kind of $30/month budget for “nicer LLM and search” so I have to split it up into Kagi pro + something else. Do I wish Kagi pro assistant has access to wolfram and code interpreter etc? Sure. But I can also get those (and more) from my ChatGPT plus subscription.

Maybe I’m the minority but I do enjoy Kagi assistant a lot. The current “fair usage” rules I think is quite reasonable and I get lots of usage out of it (and happy to add a few dollars here and there for extra usage). I will be sad to see it removed from the Kagi pro plan, and I will have to re evaluate my tools if it gets decoupled.

whs

Was waiting for the drama to died down a bit before writing my feedback.

I used to subscribe to Ultimate, when the Pro plan received access to Assistant I downgraded in the next few months.

LLM has become good that GPT mini is already good enough
Back then Kagi doesn't have conversation history, so privacy-wise it is kinda comparable to Gemini with conversation history off and that is free. Now Kagi still doesn't have E2E encryption for me to trust it to store conversation history.
The UI is very barebone. If it's part of the search offering I could understand as it is a side product, but I would never buy it in the current form.
I believe Kagi Assistant's intelligence, other than search, is also subpar. It doesn't have code execution tool like I believe Gemini on their website does internally. In some cases, it seems to not pass the raw images to the model but instead using Kagi's own intelligence to describe the image first and missed the point I'm asking. (eg. if you OCR the image first, you can't answer what color is it) From that, it make me no longer trust that Kagi will not water down the LLM for the users. Especially images where they can either downsample the input or use the lowest quality settings in LLM. If I'm paying for GPT 5 mini, I'm expecting that it should be the best that the model has to offer.

After Kagi announced this plan I already have planned my migration. I've moved to OpenRouter with Typingmind as the interface. It has a 3rd party sync extension that syncs to Google Drive or S3, with client side encryption.

k7absp2h

whs it make me no longer trust that Kagi will not water down the LLM for the users

This is exactly what puts me off Kagi Assistant.

Pleonasm

whs I've moved to OpenRouter with Typingmind....

@whs, can you kindly elaborate on your experience with OpenRouter + TypingMind, as compared to Kagi Assistant? Are you using a web search tool with OpenRouter to replace Kagi Search?

covalent

I personally have the pro plan and enjoy using cheap models (qwen235, etc) and don't incur more than a dollar of cost each month. It would be disappointing to have to pay for another plan for this once I've already been using this setup for like a year now.

EliGuzman

I use pro and I use the assistant constantly, so if it gets removed I will be cancelling, simply not worth it otherwise.

Balkft6

Luis I wouldn't advocate for a hard cap, but for a requirement to pay for extra usage. Personally I use the Assistant only for a bit less then a dollar per month, although I use it almost daily, so a hard cap would probably not hurt me. But for users with more usage then the proposed cap the step would be big to up their subscription, while paying a bit more for more usage feels more justified

ph

@Luis @Vlad This whole thread is a huge communication and marketing desaster for Kagi. I really don't understand the lack of an official response after so much time has passed. Why bring it up in the first place, asking for people's opinions, and then not react? I still like Kagi, but things like these have me question the professionalism of how the company/products are being developed. Sorry for the harsh words, but that's how it comes accross for me.

Vlad

ph What is the question? (since you @ mentioned me and I am not familiar with the thread but want to help)

some_kagi_user

Didn't expect Kagi to start their enshittification this fast. If they continue to remove features to squeeze more money out of their relatively small userbase, there won't be many users left soon

We never removed a feature for money. If anything we added a bunch of features with no price increase in 4 years. I am surprised by the tone I see. Where is that coming from?

some_kagi_user

Didn't expect Kagi to start their enshittification this fast. If they continue to remove features to squeeze more money out of their relatively small userbase, there won't be many users left soon. I upgraded to the Pro plan because of the assistant features it came with. What a typical tech bro company way to treat customers.

"We want to know, if you use our AI anyway, why not upgrade to ultimate?" Because it's almost 3x the price for Pro users and over 5x for Starters, just for some additional models. Models I don't use because you lock them out from Starter & Pro users.

If this go through I won't be renewing and going back to another search and AI/LLM platform where I can use any assistant I want for less trouble than having the 3-for-1 $29.99 Kagi will offer for every new product they add or decide to remove from existing plans.

While you're busy, why not start limiting searches on the Pro and Ultimate plans too? And create a new Max plan, the only new plan without search limits! (Unless you buy the new $5 monthly unlimited searches pack to go with your Pro and Ultimate plan! It's a great deal, we promise!)
And then ask: why don't our users upgrade to our new Max plan??? It has all their features we took away earlier!!!

Even if this doesn't go through, it shows the direction the company wants to head. Yuck. Extremely disappointing.

Balkft6

Vlad This whole thread is a reaction on the first post, where someone from Kagi stated "The change we're consideringn would turn this into more of a trial where you'd still have access to the Assistant, but only up to a fixed usage cap. Once you hit that cap, you'd need to subscribe to either the Ultimate plan or the Kagi Assistant's own subscription to keep using it (same mechanism we already have for Search)."

It would help if Kagi is upfront now about the direction it is heading with this.

ph

Vlad Thank you for your reply. I mentioned you because I think it's a topic that should be communicated clearly about, given the development of the entire thread. People obviously feel strongly about this, in different ways, and there's a lot of speculation due to the lack of an official response to the concerns raised. A definitive statement what Kagi plans to do regarding Assistant in the Pro plan - wether there is going to be less/different functionality etc. - would help, IMHO.

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