Thanks to moderator @z64 who merged my new thread into this one. I had looked for an existing thread before creating mine, but didn't find this probably due to the negative wording ("non AI" vs my term, "search only").
Reading this old thread has been disappointing to me, because it seems Kagi's leadership is well aware of the issues and user preferences being expressed here but have not prioritized them. The new tier(s) I propose should be very easy to implement, requiring no new technical features at all. The potential upside would be new customers who are either not interested in using AI or simply have smaller budgets. The only cost I see would be a slightly more complex pricing structure... and, of course, potential downstream realignment of development incentives. The impression I get is either that leadership is committed to AI feature development and needs search customers to continue subsidizing it, or that the voices here represent a small and somewhat irritating minority opinion among Kagi users.
Kagi certainly should have analytics to showing the distribution of AI usage across the user base. I suspect it is heavily weighted to a small subset of customers, but of course I don't know that. We have to trust that they are making rational decisions, but that doesn't necessarily translate to giving every customer what they want.
I see some people saying they would pay more for an "AI free" product. That seems very counter-intuitive to me, but tracks with all the emotional heat and politicized language being used. Just to be clear, I would not pay more for less, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in being happy to pay less for less, and I strongly suspect that having that option would win a slew of new customers. More to the point, I only want to pay for maintenance and development of features that I use, and that's simply not Assistant in any form.
