The AI stuff is putting me off though. I didn’t see an option to not subscribe to that. Hell, I’d pay the same rate just without the AI parts if I could.
Long term, if you want good privacy respecting services, you will need to pay for them directly. Free anything is not sustainable unless they monetize it by selling your data or serving you advertisements, which will lead to selling your data. If their revenue is dependent on you believing that the service is worth paying for, then they are incentivized to improve their service and maintain your trust.
The free tier high enough that you can get an idea of how well it works, but of course you’re not meant to stay on the free tier, it’s a trial.
I’m not talking about the free tier, I’m saying 300 searches a month for 5 bucks wasn’t worth it to me. I’m not willing to pay 120 a year for a search engine. One cent a search and they would have my five a month.
Oh yeah I didn’t even consider the base tier, I’d blow through the searches inside of a week.
For my part, it’s just enforcing something I’d do anyway, I’ve got monthly recurring donations of $5-10 for a bunch of open source projects that I find useful, particularly ones by solo devs, so, it’s not much of a stretch for me.
This seems reasonable to me, though perhaps not perfect. If you don’t want your money going towards ai development at all… IDK. I don’t think they train their own models for what it’s worth, so I think you can avoid paying ai companies by simply not using the ai parts of kagi.
The AI stuff is putting me off though. I didn’t see an option to not subscribe to that. Hell, I’d pay the same rate just without the AI parts if I could.
This is like not using Proton mail because they have VPN and office and drive and whatever else.
You don’t need to use any of it and it stays out of the way.
I was more annoyed by their base tier having such a low monthly search count. It feels low to purposefully push people to their higher tier.
Long term, if you want good privacy respecting services, you will need to pay for them directly. Free anything is not sustainable unless they monetize it by selling your data or serving you advertisements, which will lead to selling your data. If their revenue is dependent on you believing that the service is worth paying for, then they are incentivized to improve their service and maintain your trust.
The free tier high enough that you can get an idea of how well it works, but of course you’re not meant to stay on the free tier, it’s a trial.
I’m not talking about the free tier, I’m saying 300 searches a month for 5 bucks wasn’t worth it to me. I’m not willing to pay 120 a year for a search engine. One cent a search and they would have my five a month.
Oh yeah I didn’t even consider the base tier, I’d blow through the searches inside of a week.
For my part, it’s just enforcing something I’d do anyway, I’ve got monthly recurring donations of $5-10 for a bunch of open source projects that I find useful, particularly ones by solo devs, so, it’s not much of a stretch for me.
I’ve used kagi’s ai stuff like… twice, maybe. They are fully opt-in and unobtrusive. For reference, this is their ai philosophy: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html
This seems reasonable to me, though perhaps not perfect. If you don’t want your money going towards ai development at all… IDK. I don’t think they train their own models for what it’s worth, so I think you can avoid paying ai companies by simply not using the ai parts of kagi.