Heya @PeterLindstrom,
Our plans have stayed at the same price before Kagi offered any of its current day AI features. The plans are based completely around the cost of Search, not AI - we added those features as time went on at no additional cost to users.
Secondly, all AI features in Kagi are explicitly triggered by you, and that will always be the case in Search. Your searches will not use any LLMs to answer your queries unless you invoke things like Quick Answer via the button or the ?-shortcut, and likewise none of your sub money will go to any AI costs without you doing so.
Kagi would much rather have the best results out of any other engine - so you can be confident that if you can't find it on Kagi you won't find it anywhere - than to cheap out and only use one or two lower quality sources like the majority of other meta-search engines do. We are not here to make a quick buck off of you, we want to offer you the best quality at a sustainable price with a clear business model. Unlike competitors, we are not swimming in VC money, we are funded solely by our users.
I hope that helps clarify the current state of pricing - we do plan on re-architecting our subscription models in the future to more cleanly seperate Search and AI, but there are no plans at this time for offering a cheaper search - because that would mean necessarily compromising quality.
