Alternatives to pay per use search for Standard/Starter plan

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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