Apparently I am a huge fan of Kagi Assistant. How much of a fan?
- I subscribed to Kagi Ultimate as soon as Assistant was available
- https://kagi.com/assistant is my browser homepage
- I used my entire YEAR of AI credits already (and it seems Kagi just started tracking Assistant usage and billing on June 3)
The problem — there is practically no transparency on the cost. I reviewed the usage limits at https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html. It has been updated recently, but still is not very clear. The document states: "Users will receive an in-app reminder as they near their usage limit." I reached my usage limit, but I did not see any in-app reminder. I checked my billing page to see that my AI use was $268.15 out of my $270 for the year.
I appreciate that the billing page now shows the current month day-by-day usage. This is helpful.
The reality is, I probably was using Kagi Assistant too much. I used it for everything. But, there was no way for me to know this was not okay. I couldn't see my historical token use until recently. There was no in-app notification like the document says. I don't subscribe to Anthropic or OpenAI or any of the others, so I'm not sure if this vague cost model is standard across providers. I've only used AI assistants through Kagi and Ollama on my own computer.
I would expect to see cost transparency in the model dropdown — actually SHOW the in/out token costs of each model before I send it any prompt. This will help me inform my decision about which model to use.
The Assistant document references Kagi LLM Benchmark Page for costs, but these are very confusing. In addition the table references models that don't exist in Kagi Assistant.
I would also expect to have a dashboard or some way to check my usage. Basic daily usage recently became available, and this is helpful, but you guys need to do a better job here.
