Vlad Thanks for the reply. I really hope we are not reducing the scope of Kagi in the name of "premium" search engine, I find Kagi no more "premium" than Neeva frankly/honestly, apart from far better privacy by default than Neeva. I see the majority of your users here are power users/tech saavy and even though I may fall under that same category (which is why I am here), I was not like this last year, as an average user who discovered many alternatives such as Kagi out of interest, I have experience of an average user, and I can tell you that while your user base are happily paying 10 bucks a month for using a search engine, that won't be the case as Kagi grows. I have to tell, Kagi will be extremely tiny and have no scope of even becoming a legit Google alternative that make sense, if we don't even want to be in the mentality of competing with Google, because at the end of the day, no matter how big Google is and how small we may be, all of new alt search companies are in-directly competing with Google, even Kagi users are probably ex-googlers. That being said, forgive me if I misunderstood your company values or goals, but when I researched about Kagi and checked out your FAQ about section, I saw that you folks don't want to be a Google killer and be a more premium sideline brand, and now one of the main reasons for not offering a cheaper and more widely accessible search engine, according to you, is because Kagi is "premium". Personally, I see this as restricting an open internet, where we want it to be accessible for many people as much as possible, search engines aren't cars, where they are divided by the brand's focused market, luxury, economic and etc. There has been no "premium" search engine market, and it doesn't make sense to divide users because of this, and as I said, Google is a monopoly and there is a saying "There was never a king/ruler/president who leaded or ruled forever". You might come back at this by the fact that Google is enormous and Kagi killing Google is unrealistic, which stands true for the foreseeable future, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look at them as competitors, at the end of the day, every search engine should and is trying to be the next Google, even though it will take years. I think Kagi has huge potential, I prefer it over Neeva, but I do sincerely hope the pricing reduces, or at the least the free version is a usable plan instead of just a plan that acts like a trial version for paid, Neeva was just as adamant in the early stages, now they have a very usable and accessible free plan, so many more people have joined Neeva and after months or even years, they come to the point when they actually consider paying because they are so much into Neeva now (talking about average users/googlers), these folks didn't see themselves paying before when they first started using Neeva btw, I see this a lot in Neeva's slack, but in a world where free search engines are popular, it makes little sense to have a pushy free plan and a 10 dollar paid plan, it's not the best idea to convert people from free search engines, when such a brick is there in the entrance of Kagi = 50 searchers a month for free plan, that's not a fair free plan, more like a trial for paid. Not to mention, adapting a more lenient free plan means more users to give feedback and improve the platform, we can also do things like keep some features paid on free plan, but the overall plan shouldn't be this restrictive.
