Enable anonymous payments ala Bitcoin/Monero

Vlad

We are now officialy supporting OpenNode as a payment option.

More details:
https://blog.kagi.com/accepting-paypal-bitcoin

Vlad

Who will be the first to make a crypto payment? 🙂

SK

Just saw that this has been posted on Stacker News! Make sure to give it some votes there. You just login anonymously with any compatible lightning wallet. Hopefully this brings in some fresh bodies.

I'll try adding some credit to my account and see how it works.

Edit: Just tried to find it under the billing section and can't see that option. I'm Legacy Professional...currently using credit card.

kagi134

I can't find it either. When I hit Manage billing it takes me to stripe right away.

Also, small error "PayPal adn Venmo" --> "and".

Edit: Oh I see.

Go to billing
Click switch plan
At the bottom of the page, click "Alternative payment methods"
Takes you "https://kagi.com/settings?p=account_topup"
Choose option.

SK

kagi134 Cool. I see it now too. I just did $10 worth on Lightning via Phoenix Wallet. My legacy plan now shows $110 due when I get forwarded to the Stripe page rather than the typical $120, so it looks like everything is updating as it should. The integration looks great @Vlad.

Was this your first payment?!

kagi134

Perhaps improve visibility for current paying customers?

I think the saved card causes it to send right to stripe.

Vlad

SK It could be, we have a few by now, no way to tell 🙂

pablof7z

It took me quite a while to find it too, until you sent me the email saying that it was live I had been checking but definitely didn't notice the link at the bottom; I was just clicking the big "Pay" button and getting redirected to Stripe 😅

Vlad

pablof7z Ooops 🙂 How can we improve the UI?

kagi134

The big "Manage Payments" just redirects to stripe so I was confused.

I don't need to switch plans so I didn't think to click there.

Manage Payments -> Choose Payment method

This my thought process.

Vlad

Integration seems to be working great, we just got our first $500 USD "check" from OpenNode.

har1seldon

@Vlad and Kagi Team, I just wanted to thank you for the Bitcoin integration!
On top of the 10$/mo unlimited search announcement , you won a long term customer 🙂
Great work!

a5sj0fh

I just signed up for a paid account since I saw the crypto payment option, awesome. I'd love to see support for Monero, right now I have to use a swapping service to change into Bitcoin first.

X145678908765

Sorry to put another coin in the machine (pun intended) but I think you should really give another chance to Monero through Coinpayments.net or Nowpayments.io. They seem to check all the boxes from a company perspective and they're very easy to use from a user perspective.

Vlad

X145678908765 This is not trivial. Since Monero can be exchanged and used as bitcoin/lightning we'll have to settle for that and focus our resources on fixing hundreds of other open issues we have.

lolers

I am greatly disappointed that you claim to be in support of privacy, but do not offer Monero. While technically this may not be trivial, Monero is the only true privacy coin. Bitcoin can to a reasonable degree be "anonymized", but this remains inferior and susceptible to flaws compared to Monero. The mere act of "anonymizing" your Bitcoin through methods such as CoinJoin can invite suspicion from authorities.

I am afraid that after completing the 100 searches trial and being ready to subscribe, I will not do so as I am not going to jump through hoops and significant additional transaction fees to secure anonymized Bitcoin in order to pay for Kagi. I hope you guys do better than this in the future and work to enable payments with Monero.

iryio

I've been subscribed to Kagi ever since this was launched, but I always found the payment flow confusing. (Maybe this applies to all your prepaid options, not just bitcoin?)

Most recently I got a popup saying my prepayments ran out. So I visited the opennode link and added a year's worth of funds, and they showed up in my account balance, but didn't apply to my current subscription. The guilt-inducing popups continued and I couldn't find any way in the billing/settings to actually use those funds. In the Stripe flow, the only option was to use a credit card, so I bailed. Finally today my subscription was canceled for nonpayment, Only now did my account balance show up in the Stripe flow, so I was able to (re)subscribe. So basically I was using Kagi for free the past few days, although I feel bad because I wasn't trying to!

I got it figured out in the end so I don't need support or anything. I'm just leaving some UX feedback in case you find it useful.

Vlad

iryio Stripe handles the subscription management, so you should use it even if the funds are added through open node (stripe will use available balance first, no need for credit card).

Do you have any recommendations in terms of UX that we can change?

iryio

Sorry this slipped past me until now.

Kagi has a grace period of a few days after a subscription ends, where you can keep using the site. During this grace period, I paid through opennode. In the Kagi UI, my balance appeared immediately, but Stripe didn't seem aware of my balance and showed $0, so I couldn't renew my subscription. Finally a few days later my subscription was terminated for nonpayment and I was locked out of search--only then Stripe became aware of my balance and I could use my balance to subscribe all over again.

As a user I would expect Stripe to become aware of my balance immediately, instead of having to wait for the service interruption before I can bring my account current.

Tovo

Throwing my 2 cents in.
I understand the technical issues with implementing Monero, but given the number of users that will be attracted to Kagi specifically because if its privacy, it seems quite inconsistent to only offer non-anonymised payment formats.
Search is one of the most intimate services and I absolutely won't accept linking it to my identity via payment services.

Yes, you can go monero to bitcoin, but the transaction fees and hassle will turn a number of people, including myself, off.

I've spent the past few hours looking for reasonable means to do so because I really want to use and support Kagi, but its simply not worth the effort and extra cost.

Just my views on the matter, thanks for designing such a cool and useful search engine, I'm otherwise extremely impressed with the service 🙂

EDIT: I should add cash payment a la Mullvad would also be an excellent option as mentioned previously, but I can understand the reluctance to introduce this payment method.

Vlad

Tovo

Just to acknowledge that Kagi already implements with OpenNode to accept crypto payments so this is specifically about Monero.

I understand the technical issues with implementing Monero, but given the number of users that will be attracted to Kagi specifically because if its privacy, it seems quite inconsistent to only offer non-anonymised payment formats.

We heard the same argument before implementing crypto, and the reality is it attracted very small number of users (less than 0.3% Kagi users pay with crypto). Since this was extremely hard to implement, and there are already ways to convert Monero to Bitcoin so there is path to payment, and based on our previous experience we expect the impact of implementing Monero directly to be minimal, we have decided to focus our very limited resources elsewhere (eg. make search better). Thanks for understanding.

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