Thanks everyone for chiming in. We hear you and I want to step in to provde a few clarifications and my take on the topic.
includes AI bullshit built in
We do not include bullshit in the products. Products may be buggy or not feature complete, but being bullshit is not a criteria for inclusion 🙂
I like Kagi, I like that there's a financial incentive not to serve ads or trade my privacy away to get my searches done, and I like that most of the time it works pretty well. That's all I really want out of it.
This kind of all or nothing thinking is putting us at a tight spot. There are for example people who prioritize having access to the highest quality AI/Assistant (which we have because of superior search).
Kagi already caters to a small population (being uniquely user-centric product with a transparent business model) - limiting this circle to even smaller does not make much sense.
I need you to understand I am morally opposed to funding LLM
This is a valid stance. Note that all LLM in Kagi is opt-in and on-demand already. If you are not using it, you are not funding any LLMs. Wanting more than this puts us in a tight spot.
I wouldn't mind a plan without ai for the same price, but with the promise "your money does not go to ai development"
This is constructive, thanks. Dealing with billing/plans is hard though, I feel we already have too many, and complexity is not good for most users. We'd rather spend resources to make our search better, than our billing more comlpex.
Plus it sets an interesting precedent - having a plan where certain technology (that is already opt-in) is removed from the UI? Would love to consider an existing product analogy if there is one.
I have absolutely zero interest in the AI tools, I just want better search, so I wish there was a tier that focuses purely on Search (either a high limit or unlimited), but doesn't include AI or Assistant access, for a price lower than the current Professional tier.
A common misconception is that AI is more expensive than search. Opposite is true - performing a search is 100x-1000x more expensive than doing an interaction with AI.
- A single search is about ~ 1.5 cents (probably bit less these days, but general ballpark)
- A small AI model can generate a lot of tokens for the same price
To put this in perspective, 1.5 cents of Gemini Flash usage:
50,000 input tokens ≈ 37,500 words (roughly 75-150 pages of text)
or
6,000 output tokens ≈ 4,500 words (roughly 9-18 pages of text)
That is A LOT of information for the cost of just 1 search.
It may be counter-intuitive but that is how it is. If someone is using AI to answer common questions, learn about a concept, do a quick brainstorm or a translation - instead of searching - our cost is (much) lower.
So if anything, having AI lowers our cost, not increases it. This is why when we added access to AI models to Pro tier we didn't increase the price.
In fact I don't want any of my money going to these ai companies, because of their unethical practices.
That is a valid reason. Again, Kagi is set up in a way that no AI is pushed to you (see also our AI integration Philosophy so no money is going to AI companies, by default.
How about a more expensive non-AI plan? I think that is the more correct approach. If we want a company to offer us something more customized from their standard products, we are generally charged more. Those people who are passionate about not using AI would not mind paying a little more for their peace of mind.
This is valid too. As explained above, 'Pure Search' plan is likely to cost us more (especially long term as cost of AI continue to go down and cost of search stagnates or even goes up) than a plan where users use AI to augment their information needs. Pure Search at $15/month would be a plan that would make sense long term and would be 'values based' - paying more for something because it aligns with your values. (and it has supporting cost structure). Examples for this already exist in everyday life eg organic food.
Bottom line - if you want no-AI plan because you hope to get Kagi cheaper, it is not possible. If we could make Kagi cheaper we would simply do it for all our customers, and not discriminate among them.
If you are ready to pay more to have a 'Pure Search' plan with AI features removed from interface, that aligns with your values, we could consider it. This runs into complexities of having more plans to deal with
and probably being counter-intuitive to people visiting the pricing page expecting it to be cheaper.
The other complexity is that it is not really clear what is the demand for this - are we talking hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands users. We have plenty on our hands (that you can I hope surely appreciate by checking our changelog) and we need to priotize accrodingly.
Best course of action seems to be to better highlight our agnostic stance to AI, with a clear AI integration philosophy, it being opt-in and optional at all times - I feel this could clarify a lot of misconceptions already. For the majority of users that want to use it, it is there with a click or two - and for those who never want to touch it - they never have to.
Thank you for constructive discussion, we are here for you and grateful for the opportunity to brainstorm solutions to complex problems together.
