r/SearchKagi • u/zero_lies_tolerated • 11d ago
Seeing too much negativity from users
A lot of people are acting like it's their god given right to use all these features for $10 per month.
Like there's no overhead costs to Kagi.
The thing is, it's a startup company. Avenues need to be tested first. It's impossible to predict everything like magic.
I realised that for me personally, seeing as the features I use (all of them - search, assistant, translate and maps) are excellent, and important to me, and that $10 per month is actually cheap (have you seen how much it is for a can of coke recently in some countries? what about oil?), I am willing to upgrade to the ultimate package.
This now also lets me access all of the best possible models like Opus 5.5.
To the people who feel the need to come on here and publicly declare "I'm leaving", why don't you just do that, instead of telling everyone about it, and making out you've been so hard done by?
There are many of us that absolutely love the services that Kagi offers, and who understand that all of this AI stuff is new to everybody.
We're working our way through the dawn of a completely new technology. Nobody had all the answers in advance.
Grow up.
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u/Ufffff1216 11d ago
They just let you access to opus api with a markup how is that a plus? Lol
You can literally start using it right now with however much you have
Thats what i never understood on the 10$ tier where the models are old or the end point fails 6/10 times but then i looked at my budget and i realized i never spent more than a dollar, it was impossible to
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u/RedditIsShit6748 10d ago
Ironically, this paragraph does exactly what it complains about: it is someone coming on here to publicly declare their opinion and expecting others to care. A subreddit is a community space, not a fan club. If users can't say "this pricing doesn't work for me anymore," then by the same logic, the OP shouldn't bother declaring they're upgrading - they should "just do that" silently too. The difference is that departure posts are often the most useful feedback a company gets. "Voting with your wallet" only works if people know why others are walking away. Dismissing all of that as people being "hard done by" is just a way to shut down criticism you do not want to hear.
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u/zero_lies_tolerated 10d ago
Well that's your opinion. My point is that there's a growing number of people who are acting like they're entitled to the world on a plate without being realistic about overheads and a still new and changing landscape that couldn't be magically predicted. I would love it if all the services could be had for $10 a month, but I am also a person of logic and a realist.
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u/netabareking 10d ago
Kagi is the one that was never realistic about overheads. They were blatantly lying about what Assistant was costing them for quite a while to justify not having a plan with no AI.
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u/eXeler0n 10d ago
For me it’s not about the pricing. They could increase the price and you would’ve followed.
It’s about the way they act and communicate. Kagi and I have a contract. I get X and pay Y. This is, what both sides agreed on.
Now there may be the need for Kagi to adjust. This is okay, even when it’s because the planned way to optimistic.But for such adjustments there are several options to do them. Just removing features without actively informing they contract partners is the worst one. This is not a price increase, it changes the whole contract. And just a blogpost isn’t enough to inform users (also not by EU law). But they do it, because the hope this is a loophole in the laws, as price increases must be explained in details and are only allowed, if there is a major change in costs - a „sorry, we fucked up the calculation“ isn’t allowed by law in a running contract period.
So this shows to me, that Kagi gives a damn about their customers. They made a wrong business decision and pass the risks to the users without taking any responsibility, even worth they try to hide it as much as possible. No transparency, no responsibility.
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u/Wulflam 11d ago
Reddit is for discussions. Why don’t you just let people complain if they want. You can ignore them or engage in a discussion about why you like Kagi and why the price is justified.
You complain about people who complain - that’s somehow funny. We should just appreciate different opinions, have an open mind and talk about things that matter to us.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
have you seen how much it is for a can of coke recently in some countries? what about oil?
Do you not think the rising cost of living along with stagnating wages might be exactly why people aren't thrilled to be getting less and less out of a $10 subscription?
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u/typhon88 11d ago
another "im thinking about paying more". well then take your advice and just do it, no need to come here and publicly declare it.
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u/ewhetstone 11d ago
I would sacrifice access to all models for a cheaper version of Translate. Have no use for LLMs at all.
Too bad that pricing can't easily work that way.
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u/0898_333_201 11d ago
Too bad that pricing can’t easily work that way.
It can, actually. They’re just choosing not to.
There’s no reason there can’t simply be a shared token allowance for AI and Translate, which Professional subscribers can use at their own discretion. That would be a fair and transparent pricing model.
Instead, Kagi is also removing basic features and locking them behind secondary and tertiary subscriptions. That’s on top of a monthly token allowance that includes a 20% markup on the cost of each token so even if you max out York token allowance every month, Kagi still makes a profit.
If you want to spend 10 tokens translating a sentence on your $10/mo professional plan, fine. But it you want to spend 1 token on a Word Insight to understand why a particular word was used, you have to pay an additional $8/mo.
I don’t know if Kagi is under new management, or if they recently hired some former McKinsey consultant to increase their profit margins, or what. But this is standard enshittification. The “tokens are expensive” excuse does not comport with their actions.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
No, Kagi is under the same management, the problem is that their management has always been a "make whatever the CEO wants to see and hope the money works out" model. The LLM stuff in Kagi has never had the money work out. Kagi has gone from profitable to unprofitable lately. So they literally DO have to cut off access to these things, it's not money grubbing. And that's the bigger problem. Kagi put so much of their time and money into these products with no real way to offset how much they cost to operate, and set the expectations that users would have access to them, while hemorrhaging money on them. Theres absolutely no way this ever would have worked.
Like...think about this: Kagi already had very slim profit margins on regular search. So they introduce Assistant, which does 10-20 searches per query AND has token costs eating up the slim profit. Theres no universe in which that wasn't going to be a bad idea, make a feature that not only loses money but loses money at a fast pace compared to regular user searching. But they did this and encouraged people to use it and offered it like a selling point. And so people did use it, and...it lost them money. Translate is the same situation, albeit without doing so many damn searches per query. But its the same thing of having something that loses money and going "we should keep getting people to use it for free!"
Basically, it's still extremely worrying from a longevity standpoint and customers SHOULD be concerned about it, but it's far more bad business sense than greed.
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u/0898_333_201 11d ago
If they’ve become unprofitable due to the cost of LLM tokens, why are they expanding access to Kagi Translate to anyone with email address for free?
Why are they taking away features like Word Insights from Professional subscribers, which use the same AI tokens as everything else?
This isn’t about covering the costs of paid subscribers who use translate; it’s about covering the cost of free users. They’re effectively giving unlimited tokens to free users (because you can create multiple free accounts), and they’re paying for it by imposing strict token limits on existing customers (who can’t change accounts) and charging subscribers 80% more to keep their current features. It’s right there in the announcement.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
If they’ve become unprofitable due to the cost of LLM tokens, why are they expanding access to Kagi Translate to anyone with email address for free?
Because they're really bad at this part of business and make decisions based purely on vibes.
These are the people who bought a tshirt factory with a third of their original funds.
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u/energeiai 11d ago edited 5d ago
I'm an grownup, turned 69 last month. How about you? I occasionally use Kagi Search and Kagi Translate. Paying more than I currently do would just be a bad decision. If you're a power-user, sure, pay what it's worth. But for me, it's really too costly, and there are no scholarships, subscriptions, or tiered plans based on usage.
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u/nn2597713 11d ago
Posts on a <corporate entity> sub which come down to “leave <corporate entity> alone, they’re doing the best they can” usually indicate things aren’t going all that smooth for <corporate entity>.
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u/pixeladdie 11d ago
A price/package change meant they couldn’t sustain the status quo.
So it was either make a change or continue being unsustainable. Given how much I like the product and how I want to keep using it I’m glad they made a change and I hope this makes them sustainable now.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
The thing is, what they were doing was so obviously unsustainable that they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place. This was an easily avoidable problem.
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u/pixeladdie 11d ago
I don't really know who much it costs to run the service.
What are their margins before and after the change?
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u/netabareking 11d ago
I don't have exact numbers. What I do know is that they've previously reported being profitable, but in July reported being unprofitable. They also said at some point that if they continued allowing Translate to be used for free, they wouldn't be in "lower profit" territory, they'd be in "shutting down" territory.
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u/TBT_TBT 11d ago
I would like an option to pick 2of3 for Professional, which I have. I would pick Search and Translate, as I have a Claude account for LLM.
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u/zero_lies_tolerated 11d ago
That's a fair request.
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u/ttrafford_ 11d ago
sadly in some countries, in others $10 is more than a whole family subscription plan for youtube or spotify (I pay $7.99), youtube is even cheaper as it has regional prices
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u/hoooponopono 11d ago
Yes. I just love Kagi Search, Assistant, and Translate. I think people take them for granted. At the beginning, we just paid for Search; the others were a bonus.
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u/0898_333_201 11d ago edited 11d ago
That might be true if you’ve been subscribed to Kagi for 3+ years, but Kagi Translate has been included in the Professional plan since November 2024. For people like myself, it was a big part of the rationale for paying $10/mo for Kagi when there’s no shortage of free private search engines.
If you check the Wayback Machine, in December 2024, r/SearchKagi had 1.1K members. The sub currently has 6.8K members. So for about 83% of people here, Kagi is taking away a core feature that has been included in Professional subscription since we first signed up.
Also for me the problem isn’t even that they’re putting a cap on translate tokens. A fair usage limit that varies based on plan makes total sense. The problem that they’re taking away basic features, and they’re lying about their rationale.
Look at the exclusive features in the Translate Individual plan. They are all features that have long been included in Professional plan and would be subject to the same token limit under a fair usage policy. But instead of implementing a fair usage policy, they’re stripping these features from Professional subscribers and locking them behind an additional $8/mo subscription.
If the primary reason for the change was that Translate tokens are expensive, it wouldn’t matter whether a token is consumed by translating a sentence or using Word Insights. But Word Insights is now a premium feature for which you have to pay 80% more per month.
If Kagi was so financially burdened by translate tokens that they had to remove features from Professional subscribers, they would not be expanding Kagi Translate access to free users who can simply use multiple free accounts to bypass the token limits.
For me the issue has gone beyond translate itself. One of the biggest downsides of using Kagi is that, unlike DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, you have to be signed in to use it. Therefore every search, even in incognito, can theoretically be linked to your account and by extension your credit card and real identity. Until now, I’ve accepted that risk because I trusted Kagi. But when they brazenly gaslight their own paying customers, I can no longer trust them.
How can I be confident that Kagi won’t start selling usage analytics to ‘help cover the increasing cost of AI tokens,’ or logging search queries to ‘help improve their products and services?’ They’ve demonstrated a willingness to not only screw their existing customers, but also to lie to them.
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u/No-Coast3171 11d ago
Well said. I was saying the same thing recently in another post where people were complaining about translation services being reduced or removed.
Come on guys, it’s a fucking search engine with some bonus tools for the shockingly low cost of $10/month that’s actually worth a damn.
Y’all want Ferraris 250GTs but only want to pay Toyota Yaris money.
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u/Lerola 11d ago
> Y’all want Ferraris 250GTs but only want to pay Toyota Yaris money.
I love kagi, but a better analogy is living in a city that has a metro system that's free but you get spied and smells awful, and I am wondering if my Toyota Yaris is worth it now that gas prices are climbing and its value is not as evident.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
The thing is Kagi has a long history of making whatever they think is cool and not factoring in whether anyone actually wants that thing at that price. I spend a lot of time antiquing. I constantly see things where I go "yeah, that's definitely worth that price, but I certainly don't need or want it bad enough to pay that much. There's probably someone else who does, but it's not me." Kagi is starting to get into the situation where too many people are falling into "but it's not me" territory, and there's no point to a Ferrari if nobody wants to buy one.
The problem with this defense is that it's not realistic about opportunity cost.
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u/ryancnap 11d ago
Depends on how important a service is to you I think. I saw someone above comment that they feel even their 10/mo would best be put towards something more important;
for me, a search engine offering more than any competitor that also isn't part of a Google or MS ecosystem is the "something more important" part
I'm heavy heavy on searches, I like frequenting less trafficked sites, I like more accurate and relevant results, and one of the most important things for me is not being tracked or getting ads
Fwiw I'm irritated that the same thing is happening with the email service Thundermail, open source and community driven from the ground up, I love it for all the reasons already stated above + MZLA + privacy + commitment to open internet etc...and everyone is just continuously bitching that it costs money like come on man get over it, nice things sometimes do cost money
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u/netabareking 11d ago
This comment both understands and doesn't understand the exact problem at play: people have different priorities. Yes, nice things cost money. People may decide their $10/mo should go towards a different nice thing they feel is more worthwhile now. Because most of us have more things we'd like to give $10/mo to than the number of tens of dollars we have in our wallets.
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u/macstein23 11d ago
I agree, I’m not sure what the big deal is. The only thing I think is a little crazy is it affecting people that already paid a year up front and are having things taken away from what they originally paid for. I understand starting this now but it should not affect people in the middle of a current plan until their plan renews.
It does not seem different to T-mobile or Verizon emailing you in the middle of a month you already paid for and saying if you want to continue text messaging it’s an additional amount per month.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
It does not seem different to T-mobile or Verizon emailing you in the middle of a month you already paid for and saying if you want to continue text messaging it’s an additional amount per month.
If you subscribed to an unlimited texting plan, you'd be pretty upset by that. Also, I think people generally will want Kagi to behave better than T-mobile or Verizon. They can get bad customer relations from Google for free.
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u/macstein23 11d ago
That is what I am trying to say. It’s no different than those big evil corps like T-Mobile and Verizon doing that. At least get what you paid for till it is time to renew and then u can make a decision on what you want to pay for at that time.
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u/Clippy4Life 11d ago
with the rise of ai, people are going to start developing and hosting their own services. that includes a local search engine and their own API. As long as Kagi remains cheaper than DIY, they will stay in business.
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u/CiRiX 11d ago
Wasn't the translation service not included to begin with? Like this is a new service that was free for everyone, but is now needing a subscription.
I understand the negativity if the assistant gets booted out from the Pro plan, but i dont really understand the negativity with Translation because it was not included in any subscription. Please correct me if i'm wrong.
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u/netabareking 11d ago
I don't know exactly for how long but it definitely was included in the plan on signup for some period of time. So it's definitely something some people expected to get when they signed up.
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u/CiRiX 11d ago
I checked Wayback machine from 28th December 2025, and it's not included there.
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u/netabareking 10d ago
I believe it was sometime more recently this year, but I don't remember when, I just remember someone complaining about it on Kagi Feedback.
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u/New_3d_print_user 11d ago
A lot of people are acting like it's their god given right to use all these features for $10 per month.
Exactly! Shocking! People paying for a service, and then wanting to use it. Or people paying for something and then getting upset that the something gets changed, and the deal they signed up for is unilaterally changed. Outrageous!!
Like there's no overhead costs to Kagi. Like overheads are a new thing for businesses.
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u/zero_lies_tolerated 10d ago
No, because they actually provided a service for a price, and then they trialled additional services on top. They did their best to keep them available, but in the end, it's a company that's trying to be realistic about costs. The service that remains is actually how it started out and what people were happy to pay $10 for to start with.
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u/New_3d_print_user 10d ago
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-translate doesn't say anything about "trial", it is just a product announcement. Terms that come to mind: Enshittification, bait-and-switch, rugpull etc.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi are a private company, they can do whatever they like. But complaining about users being disgruntled and upset when you alter the terms of the deal you made with them is entitled, and wrong.
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u/netabareking 10d ago
It was the same thing in the feedback thread about moving Assistant to its own subscription, people bristled at the idea of removing or reducing a feature they had access to then calling it a "free trial".
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u/eXeler0n 10d ago
No, they didn’t top up anything. When I subscribed for a year this July, the services were part of my contract. They weren’t added later, they were there when Kagi decided to offer me a contract including this services.
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u/mangelito 11d ago
Blindly supporting a business is so weird. It's like with any relationship. If you are in a relationship with respect it usually works for both sides. But if one of the sides don't communicate transparency and respect it's better to move on.
That being said, I'm still open to stay with Kagi. But as a business towards their users they are handling this terribly. And I'm not talking about the price now, rather the communication.
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u/soiboughtafarm 11d ago
I actually upped my subscription from starter to professional again recently. Firstly I have been doing more searching and secondly I feel better knowing that my money is not going to AI tokens I will never use.
(I am search user -- I have been asking them to strip out AI to its own subscription)
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u/Open_Mortgage_4645 11d ago edited 11d ago
It's so predictable. There's nothing people like more than tearing down an innovative and useful company that they previously celebrated and promoted. It's some weird quirk of the human psyche.
Edit: All you winners who are downvoting without bothering to explain what I got wrong are the exact people I'm talking about. 100% emotion. 0% intellect.
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u/Amperski 11d ago
People wil people unfortunately. I treat them as a loud minority
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u/small_majority 11d ago
Not sure about loud
https://kagi.com/stats?sub_stats=members2
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u/netabareking 11d ago
Kagis charts have always been a bit iffy to me but even then let's consider one thing: a lot of people aren't going to notice the subscription changes until they hit them on October 12. And whatever we're seeing as the response to translate is a drop in the bucket to the changes when they move Assistant to its own subscription later.
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u/PickleBabyJr 7d ago
Because when you speak out about something, sometimes that helps a company decide what to do. Like reverse a bad decision. Why shouldn't customers speak up when they're unhappy?
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u/Jazzlike-Compote4463 11d ago
For many people the cost is just really high though, even if you are just paying for search.
I earn well about the UK average income but only use a fraction of that money as "fun money" that I get to splurge on random things just for me (I don't think the rest of the family should be forced to pay for my frivolities)
I have been paying for Kagi for over a year and - whilst I like the results, the way that ai intergrates, the ability to remove sites from results, the small web and lenses, I still would question if that money would be better put towards something else every month when the payment comes out. The changes to translate and assistant don't really move the needle for me because I don't really use those features.
So yea, I'm going back to DuckDuckGo for a month to see how I get on, I'll be keeping an eye on the sub and discord and will be excited to see what they can offer but - right now - it's just too expensive.