Lower cost subscription lacking AI features

tea

A reduced cost subscription for users not wishing to access AI features.

AI is expensive to run, and so this is (reasonably) reflected in the base subscription cost. For users skeptical of its usefulness, a lower-cost sub that explicitly gates off AI features could be useful.

Sometimes when I talk about Kagi with people, they bring up that it is another "AI techbro" company, and that the sub must cost extra for access to AI.

AI has ethical issues which some of these people take issue with. Its environmental impact, copyright implications, and general prevalence of false information, turns them off from wanting to try Kagi in the first place.

laiz

tea AI is expensive to run, and so this is (reasonably) reflected in the base subscription cost.

For Kagi, providing high quality search results is far, far more expensive than the AI features included in the Professional tier. They are essentially a nice perk on top, and do not affect the pricing that much.
So, in other words, a "no AI features" professional plan could be like $9.80/month, and make the whole plan page more crowded/confusing.

Lastly, Kagi is far from an AI techbro company, see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html

jade_oolong

tea I was about to post the exact same idea. Opt in features are good indeed for AI use, but for users like me and I suppose OP, we simply would like a cheaper subscription tier that excludes AI features. Or maybe extra charges billed based on your use of AI features.
Essentially what I mean is I dont want to financially participate in AI usage of the whole Kagi userbase. I understand this would probably require some developments to enforce this separation, but if we're a lot to want this from the service, it could be worth it.

keyes

I don't like the AI features either, but you need to explicitly opt into them with Kagi; for example, by appending a question mark to the end of a query. This is way better than the status quo with Bing, Google, and Brave, which will automatically use AI for almost every query, and only Brave Search seems to have an opt-out. If you care about the environmental impact, it's as simple as not using those features on Kagi.

DieterK

keyes

I don't like the AI features either, but you need to explicitly opt into them with Kagi; for example, by appending a question mark to the end of a query.

Correct. In Settings -> AI -> Auto Quick Answer this feature can also be disabled.