Alright, took me a bit to put it into words so here it is:
People who use ultimate to get work done faster are usually in the IT space where we make anywhere from $3000 to $20000 a month. Spending $25 a month is really nothing special so here are my suggestions.
Increase the ultimate plan to $30/month while still being subsidized by other users, the actual price should be whatever makes the plan profitable then keep the received AI credits the same as a heavy daily user I feel like it's just enough to use opus regulary while dropping down to cheaper models whenever conversations drag on during research - this is perfect for people who simply either: want to support kagi, use AI to try out the latest, use it to understand expansive topics quickly.
Now, once the AI credits run out, you enter the 'power user' territory where none of the tokens you use are subsidized - it's something you have to either purchase before hand or get billed for overages (more on this later) there will have to be some system to combat abuse althought I assume it won't be much of an issue because as I said for us power users spending even $100/month isn't a big deal when it helps us cut our work days in nearly half (don't believe the 10x stories, it's closer to 1.5x - 1.8x on a good day).
If you want to continue using stripe for AI credits there should be a seperate subscription for it. (completely independent from any subscription tier) where you can buy flat amounts such as 10k 50k 100k that carry over to next month as these aren't subsidized.
In short: Raise the ultimate price so it's not a loss leader anymore, introduce API for ultimate, create unsubsidized ai credit bundle subscriptions for power users. Searches should just cost ai credits to keep it simple.
Other recommendations:
Because the cost of the ultimate plan will increase, allow the professional plan (with a hard cap of ~10 messages per model) to access the expensive models for people who simply want to try it out.
-- this is a rant
I recommend taking the time to figure out how to cut down on payment processor fees - obviously creating something like stripe would be simply way too difficult, because that's why stripe exists. However, there are plenty of lesser known alternatives which have several percent lower fees and even lesser fees at the enterprise level. For example, although it's made for game servers tebex.io offers significantly lower fees while having stronger chargeback protection than stripe due to them being in the gaming space where chargebacks are rampant.
