Hm, this seems like a hard problem to tackle. So for the time being it seems like Kagi usage will simply get more expensive for me and my fellow Standard + pay-per-use brothers.
In the long run, do you have any options to decrease your cost? Either on the search side or on the payment processing site? Will bigger volume result in a more attractive fee structure at these payment processors? Can you somehow make better deals?
From what you've written here it seems like you're generating too much cost per search. Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not an experienced business man, but if this is your cost floor, I don't really see how the business can scale given that you want to pay your employees fair wages that ideally increase faster than inflation.
Compute, storage, traffic, etc. will probably get cheaper in the future, but I wonder if that is enough.
It's a tough situation to be in, because it is really hard for me to justify to pay $10 a month for my search engine (or to recommend it to peers for that matter).
It's not that I can't afford it (it's just $3-4 more than I pay now), but I really feel like a service like this shouldn't cost as much. And with the current pricing structure you're most likely only (or mostly) targeting progammers or other powerusers, while "regular folk" don't really fit in the provided brackets.
On Discord you mentioned there were around 200 users affected negatively by this new change. According to https://kagi.com/stats that's >2% of your user base (Edit: You've mentioned 2.7% yourself above). While that doesn't seem like much, I assume this is the bracket were most of the population will find themselves in. So if you ever plan to scale your service beyond powerusers, these people have to be fitted in somehow.
I don't really know what the solution is here, I can only tell you that I won't be able to convince any of my friends to use Kagi when they're supposed to pay $10 monthly for the privilege. Even I have a very hard time justifying it and I'm basically as degoogled and decentralized as it gets and have already enjoyed roughly three months of Kagi usage. So if you can't convince me, you certainly won't be able to convince average joe (although on average people act less economically than me, so who knows).
All I can really say is that a price hike of +50% leaves a really sour taste in my mouth and I feel like you haven't quite dialed in that pricing yet.
Edit:
Vlad Ideally the blocks would be bigger (such as 5,000 searches for $100 or 1,000 for $20) so that this effect is less pronounced).
Unfortunately even at the bigger block size that pricing isn't really compelling. 5,000 searches is what I'd consider the ceiling of what I use in 10 months, judging from my usage so far (~ 3 months). For $100 this basically boils down to $10 per month, which is even more than the annual unlimited plan. (Granted, we're talking about the ceiling here, it's quite possible I could stretch 5,000 searches over 12 or even 13 months, but that still gives me ~$7.70 which is still more than I've paid until now. To be fair, it's hard to determine my exact usage by just three months of usage so far.)
