Kagi Student Plan

zeroaddress

I was just casually browsing and saw Google’s promo — they’re giving Gemini AI Pro + Veo 3 + 2TB of storage for free to students.
That got me thinking if Kagi offered a student plan.
I checked the website but couldn’t find anything, so I figured I’d ask here — do you have any plans to introduce a student plan?

I think it would be super helpful. Indeed, a lot of big tech companies (like Google) are offering free or discounted access to students to encourage them to try out their services 🤓🎓

madhatter

I'm just another user but I thought it might help you have some context if you see that a lot of related discussion has taken place here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing

Dustin

Vlad's response from the thread @madhatter linked:

95% of our cost is search. Also a single search costs us 1.5 cents to deliver, so at 1000 searches/mo, assuming you are on $10/mo subscription, Kagi is losing money on you.

Regional pricing is typically what companies with high margin products do, or in cases where the cost of goods to produce depends on the location. But searching the entire web costs the same whether done from a desert in the middle of nowhere or from New York, and the results are same high quality Kagi results in both cases so "regional pricing" is not possible.

If we are able to reduce the cost of search, we would just reduce the price for everyone, we would not discriminate users based on location or other criteria.

gabs

Personally, I'd implement something like how Tuta does it. In Tuta's case, they give a discount to students, and a special limited free plan to open source mantainers. For example, such an plan would have around 150-200 searches.

For more context, these are the links to Tuta's plans:

Open Source: https://tuta.com/blog/tutanota-for-open-source-teams
Discount: https://tuta.com/discount

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Marking this as under review to invite open discussion similar to the regional pricing thread. As @Vlad said over there, our price is fixed no matter who searches or where from. If we could decrease our search cost we would simply pass that onto users unilaterally.

Rot127

One thing which is exceptionally useful for students is the Study AI/model.
Professors suffer a lot from students generating homework with AI currently. But they won't stop using AI, because often students haven't learned how to learn at the start of their studies.

I also think the whole academic world is absolutely desperate to integrate AI into teaching in a productive way. Meaning that it encourages their students to learn by interaction and active thinking, instead of just falling for the illusion of knowing when they copy paste something.
The study model would give professors and students alike a useful and productive tool at hand.

Professors could recommend Kagi's study AI as alternative to ChatGPT and others.
Additionally there could be an intro or disclaimer for students how to use it well.
E.g. the recent blog post about AIs being bullshitters but still useful.
Or with the student plan could come a guide for professors how to use it in class.

The custom assistant configuration could be advertised to professors to fine tune the model to their class and then distribute it to their students to interact with it. A nice addition to a class.

In any case, having the study model in the ultimate plan is prohibitive for students, because it is simply too expansive.

I am not sure about the cost aspect of course. But if a "Free Student Tier" (authenticated with a university email address) would give the default Free Tier of Kagi + the Study model it would already be super useful. The other premium models are not be included in this.

On top of this there could be a paid students tier with more searches and more AI credits and the research AI but no other premium models?

That said, economically a student tier can be justified as medium term investment.
Students are often knowledge workers and likely get jobs which require tools like Kagi.
Giving them access during their studies, increases the likelihood that they will become customers when they finished them.