Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Pay for search? There should be another approach… at this rate will be paying for every single thing we do on internet and navigating properly would require a bunch of money .
Development costs money, servers cost money, and use of other providers APIs to assist in providing results costs money.
Paying a monthly service fee to not have the company sell your data under the guise of “free” sounds quite reasonable.
I find some features useful like deranking domains. This can be used to remove those spammy StackOverflow clones.
I understand and I agree. I tried it already and kagi is great. But I’m concerned about the amount of services we will need to pay in order to stay out of the eyes . I’m not sure if it’s the way.
We have to pay for the services we use somehow. I'd rather it be cash than the details of my entire life. But the money to operate those services has to come from somewhere
That's fair, but I think they're charging too much.
Bitwarden stores my passwords, and they only ask $10/year for their "advanced" plan, and i use them almost as much as search. Mullvad VPN is privacy respecting and costs $5/month for unlimited usage.
I understand search is more compute intensive than password storage, and more R&D intensive than a VPN, but $10/month is a hard pill to swallow for that service. I could see $10/month for a combined search, VPN, TOTP, and password storage service, but just search doesn't feel like enough for that cost. Also, I have no guarantees aside from their word that they're not selling my data. If they were a nonprofit, I might be more interested.
So Kagi has released some financial information last year: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials
I'd love to see more updated numbers since it seems to have become slightly more popular since last year but I can't imagine them doing better than continuing to nearly break even.
Interesting, it looks like they're only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they'll be able to drop prices.
I wish they'd combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I'd already be a customer. But it's just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I'd seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn't attractive at current prices.
I'll certainly check back once they've matured a bit, but I'm not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn't ideal.
Careful! That's dangerously close to expressing an understanding of nuance on the Internet! /s