Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath

    • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I get a notification every month telling me that they will charge me for my monthly Kagi subscription and every single month i feel the same:

      ‘Totally worth it!’

      • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        I feel like their pricing would make more sense if you could just pay for your usage, rather than forcing a subscription

        • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          They do have different tiers depending on your search volume and features, so in a way they already have this. I’d hate to have to go through checkout every time i did a search.

            • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              They have 100, 300, and unlimited for $0, $5, and $10

              How much would you be willing to pay per search? And do you know how many searches you make every month?

              For me, i pay not for the searches as such, but to not be tracked and be shown more ads than search results

              • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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                3 months ago

                I haven’t been using kagi long enough to really understand how it works yet, but it’s my understanding that they want you to pay every month, even if you had remaining searches from the previous month.

                If I pay $5 for 300 searches, why does it matter if I do them within a time frame? When someone isn’t’ searching, they aren’t really costing Kagi anything.

                Alternatively, let people pay 1.6 cents per search (or 1.8 cents or something).

                • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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                  3 months ago

                  Basically because the product they’re selling isn’t “You get to do a search whenever” but “You get to do a search this month”.

                  The reason for that, based on my experience with various web startups, is they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.

                  If millions of people pay their $5 and then don’t use their searches, then in the extreme case Kagi could be maintaining servers twenty years later in anticipation that their customers might use those searches.

                  It’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point.

                  Also, on the customer side, there’s a psychological benefit to free things. Free as in “already paid for; no cost to using it”.

                  If you have something that can be used this month but not any other month, then using it is free. If using it now means you can’t use it next year, then there’s still a cost to it despite it already being paid for.

                  • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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                    3 months ago

                    they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.

                    I think you are definitely correct here. However, you are overlooking the actual main goal of every business - making as much money as possible.