Alternatives to pay per use search for Standard/Starter plan

jacobbrunson

I’m ok with the change, I just wish it was communicated with a little more transparency and empathy for us pay-per-use users who fell through the cracks.

TisButMe

In the long run, do you have any options to decrease your cost? Either on the search side or on the payment processing site?

We're absolutely looking at that, and we have some ideas around that topic (eg. maybe if you search "facebook" we auto redirect you to facebook instead of doing a search, etc...), so I expect our costs to go down, but probably not by a factor of 2. Very transparently, with a bunch of new users coming with the launch of unlimited, and with assistant on the way, we probably won't have the time/resources to focus on that in the next few months. I don't think we're a big enough fish to negotiate lower payment processing fees from Stripe yet, or to negotiate with our search providers, but the more Kagi users there are, the more leverage we have.

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.

I wish we could offer it cheaper! I know we're pricing out big segments of the population. We're not doing this to make investors rich, we don't have big fancy offices, we don't spend on marketing, and our team is 15 people to compete with companies with thousands of employees 🙂 Google makes more money per month per user through ads that what we're priced at - in a way we're already cheaper than Google, it's just that the money comes from a clearer source.

What if it were left up to a reseller to figure out? Some of their plans/tiers might turn out to be able to be free, who knows?

We're happy to consider this of course, we have a search API that can be used by business customers. If someone wanted to build something on top of that they absolutely could. Reach out if you know anyone interested 🙂

I’m ok with the change, I just wish it was communicated with a little more transparency and empathy for us pay-per-use users who fell through the cracks.

Yeah that's absolutely fair criticism - I think what happened there is that we anticipated that the people on the Standard plan who had overages would also prefer a $10 plan as long as it was unlimited. We had a bunch of feedback indicating this (eg. "I can't justify $25 for unlimited, and I'm not happy to pay more than $5 for anything with limits"). Looks like we were wrong, and there are users who aren't represented in that feedback. We'll learn from this and do better next time, apologies.

jwldk

I still haven't reached my limit of 300 in a month yet, but I liked having the reassurance that I could always pay a little extra that month. I do understand the issues with not having an overly complicated pricing model and that credit card fees on small transactions makes it very unprofitable.

Would an option do to something similar to the API credit, where we have the option to add a set amount of prepaid credits that can be deducted on a per use basis?

assocresp

Just chiming in as another Standard + pay-per-search user who fell through the cracks here.

$5 + whatever extra searches I used was very palatable, but $10 per month feels like quite a big jump and is kinda hard to justify when I have so many other subscription services to pay for. I usually ended up paying around $6-7/month, so this is pushing me to pay more, and I have to decide if I want to re-commit, and whether the value proposition is worth it.

It's also quite hard to recommend to friends now. $5 was quite an easy recommendation for a quality service like Kagi, but for $10 it has to be REALLY worth it, and a substantial jump in quality from the competitors. Maybe I can just about justify this to myself as I'm a 'power user' (or apparently a 'starter' as I'm now classed as), but for a lot of my friends/family, I don't think they'll agree.

I don't know what the solution is. Maybe increase the number of searches on the starter plan?

Either way, thanks for the quality service. I've really enjoyed the experience up until this point. 🙂

TisButMe

We can think about offering search bundles, yeah, but as we said to make them work on our end they'd have to be priced so that each search is profitable, and with payment fees what they are... it doesn't work very well for small bundles.

To repeat the post above, the math works out to:

500 search bundle -> (((500*1.5)*1.2)+30)*1.05=976~ say $9
1000 search bundle -> (((1000*1.5)*1.2)+30)*1.05=1922 ~ say $19
5000 search bundle -> (((5000*1.5)*1.2)+30)*1.05=9482 ~ say $90
10000 search bundle -> (((10000*1.5)*1.2)+30)*1.05=18932 ~ say $180

At 500 searches/month, assuming you buy a 5000 bundle, that would work out to $9/month, which is the price of unlimited if paid annually. If you get a 10k search bundle, maybe we can cut the margin a bit because the numbers are bigger, but even with 10% margin that would only land you in the ~$8.5 range/month.

It's just really hard to make it work like that 🙁

danvpeterson

Just ran into this myself and super frustrated. I appreciate all the context and reasoning, but still making a tough call of either getting rid of Kagi for me, or finding a way to justify twice the cost at $10/mo in our budget right now. I'm under 300 searches a lot of the time, but it's too frustrating to stay on Starter and having to switch to another search service when I do go over.

I'm considering switching to Pro just for a month when I hit the limit, and then switching back, but that's definitely a pain. Gonna have to think on it a bit, I really do love Kagi and will miss it a lot if I leave. Just really struggling to get our budget back under control right now :/

Cooper

Hi all, chiming in as another pay-per-use user. I use Kagi primarily as a not-Google search engine. I have little interest in, and almost never use, any of the AI features.

Would restricting or removing access to the AI features on the starter plan lower your costs enough to increase the number of searches in that plan to, say, 500? I like the ~$5 price point and would like to stay there even if it means sacrificing features.

TisButMe

Maybe surprisingly, because we use cheaper models on the standard/pro tiers, it's really the search itself that leads to these costs, and not the AI features.

Vlad

Today we made a change that can have positive feedback for everyone here.

We made the Starter annual plan come with 3600 searche, renewed annualy (vs 300 renewd each month). This allows much more flexibility for users and ability to basically carry over 'unused' searches month over month.

Hopefully this brings us close to a satisfactory solution for everyone.

STM

Vlad So, what exactly is the supposed workflow when we finish the 3600 searches before the 12 months end? Un- and resubsribe?

If I make a little example calculation with 400 searches each month (judging from current data, this might be more realistic than the previously quoted 500), the 3600 searches will last for 9 months.
Given 10% price reduction for annual subscriptions, this basically boils down to $54 / 9 months = $6 monthly, which is a very acceptable price, I'd say.

Vlad

STM

So, what exactly is the supposed workflow when we finish the 3600 searches before the 12 months end? Un- and resubsribe?

Pretty much yes, until we figure out something better. We just wanted to give an option and give it quickly.

STM

When is this going live @Vlad?

Vlad

STM This is already live

STM

Vlad

Quick UX feedback: When switching from monthly Professional to yearly Starter, my number of searches went from 468 to 469, and only after a refresh to 0 for the new payment period.

(I highly hope I didn't just hallucinate that and this is a legitimate bug report ^^')

Vlad

STM Not sure I understand - would be best if this was presented as a new bug report.

voussoir

~~nevermind. sorry.~~

Vlad

voussoir Please see here

https://kagifeedback.org/d/2018-alternatives-to-pay-per-use-search-for-standardstarter-plan/8

and here

https://kagifeedback.org/d/2018-alternatives-to-pay-per-use-search-for-standardstarter-plan/22

voussoir

~~nevermind. sorry.~~

carl

voussoir

You'rer agonizing over very small amounts of money. If your budget is strained in this way, maybe Kagi should be considered a luxury that has to be left out for now.

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