I'm an electrical engineering student at King Saud University in Riyadh. Kagi Pro at $10/month is around 37 SAR. The standard KSU science-track stipend is 1,000 SAR/month, so a Pro subscription would take roughly 4% of my entire monthly income before food, transport, or anything else. Starter at $5 is more reasonable but still tight on a student budget, and the 100-search trial runs out before I can fairly evaluate whether the service is worth committing to.
I read Vlad's replies in the existing "Implement regional pricing" thread before writing this, and the unit economics he laid out make sense. Each search costs Kagi about 1.5 cents to deliver. The current Starter plan ($5 for 300 searches) is already running on roughly $0.50 of margin. So a 50% blanket discount on Pro for low-income countries doesn't work, and that's not what I'm asking for.
What I think actually works: a verified, region-locked Starter tier priced to recover cost rather than turn profit. 200 searches at $3/month is $3.00 in raw search cost and $0 margin. Kagi isn't subsidizing anyone here. It's just choosing not to profit on users who currently can't pay $5+ at all and who default to Google because of it.
Effect on existing UX is minimal. Logged-out flow stays identical. Payment flow gains one optional verification step for users in eligible countries (upload a government-issued ID, billing address must match). Existing customers see no change. No price increase to subsidize anything, because the regional tier covers its own cost.
The strategic point: the customer who signs up at $3 today is the customer who upgrades to Pro or Ultimate the moment they graduate and start earning. Right now Kagi is missing that entire pipeline in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, and similar markets. These aren't people who will never pay, they're people for whom there's currently no on-ramp.
User flow:
User in an eligible country visits kagi.com/pricing. A small banner appears: "We noticed you may be in [Saudi Arabia]. You may qualify for regional pricing."
User clicks through and uploads a national ID via a verification provider (Stripe Identity, Veriff, or similar).
Country, billing address, and card-issuing country are cross-checked. VPN and proxy detection runs at the payment step.
Once verified, the regional Starter tier unlocks at the local price for that account only. Discount is non-transferable.
If the user later changes billing country to a non-eligible region, the discount drops off at next renewal.
How other companies already implement this:
Readwise applies a recurring discount of around 50% after a one-time manual ID review for users in non-US countries. ParityDeals (paritydeals.com) is a Stripe-native service that handles the entire flow including coupon rotation and VPN/Tor detection, so abuse gets caught at checkout rather than after the fact.
Pricing precedents from major SaaS in 2025-2026:
Spotify launched Saudi/UAE specific plans on November 13, 2025: Lite at SR23.99 (~$6.40), Standard at SR31.99 (~$8.50), Student at SR15.99 (~$4.27). India saw three new tiers including Premium Lite at ₹139/month (~$1.60).
Apple One Individual is $19.95/month in the US versus ₹195/month (~$2.34) in India for the same product.
YouTube Premium ranges from about $0.90/month in Argentina to $21.12/month in Switzerland, billed by account country with VPN switching explicitly against ToS.
Netflix basic in Egypt is 70 EGP (~$1.46) versus 32 SAR (~$8.53) in Saudi Arabia versus higher in Western markets.
Internal precedent inside Kagi: the "Kagi for Libraries" program already accepts that institutional access can be subsidized, and Vlad described it as a step toward partner-funded search. A natural extension is "Kagi for Universities," where universities like KSU, KFUPM, KAU, and KAUST sign institutional deals covering their student bodies. KSU alone has approximately 70,000 students. One institutional contract covers more seats than years of individual ID verifications.
Either path (verified individual regional Starter, or university institutional deals, or both) closes the gap in a way that respects Kagi's "no VC, no ads, no subsidies from existing users" position. The math works because the regional Starter price still covers its own search cost. The growth opportunity is real because emerging-market knowledge work is the fastest-growing segment of paying SaaS users globally.
Dropdowns:
"This suggestion concerns:" → Pricing (or Billing, whichever option exists)
"This suggestion pertains to:" → Kagi Search (the feature touches search plans specifically)
