I would pay 3-4$ a month for search for like 1K search a month no AI. Current 5$ for 300 searches per month is too much. Maybe even less with 2y commitments a la NordVPN
Free things cost us far more than we realize, and that has left us deluded as to the appropriate cost of paid things. We're also incredibly reluctant to sacrifice for the greater good.
What is the value to society of having a search engine alternative that doesn't desperately mine and monetize every single thing about us they can?
It's not just a search engine subscription.
This could be a first step towards freeing us from advertising. An investment in an alternate vision that doesn't rely on rampant manipulation and consumerism.
The cost is, what, a few coffees per month? Can we afford to not support initiatives like this? We can steer away from a feudalist cyberpunk dystopia.
Yet, after all of that, I still don't want to pay $10/mo.
It was always a dubious business idea, but now with AI being able to handle search so well, I can’t imagine ever paying.
Maybe if it was a secure instance you could order for your organisation. Like a police force or consulting company, where you don’t want people eavesdropping on your traffic.
I have the same question. Kagi can use and should use machine learning (aka AI) to process data, provide and sort search results. But an option to have it return only information that comes from the source (the search results), at a low price without ads, would be more useful for me. And perhaps competitive differentiation for Kagi.
I agree that vanity cars that are a shitty car that looks like a classic serve little value. However good cars that "interpolate" and reinterpret classics can be absolutely fine; the originals did become classics for a reason.
The Renault 5 looks great and has a solid price point for entry. I was this was available in the US. I think it would do quite well here at the < 30k price point.
Those cars are also just very practical for a lot of people. It's not a family car, but not everyone needs a family car. Afaik they are so popular because they can be leased relatively cheaply.
Lovely - not my typical reaction to a 500px wide, gray, monospaced site, but I suppose it is lovely that it isn't a 5MB creature like we expect nowadays.
> Page size around 85 KB
If they compressed their favico the site would be closer to 5KB!
Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
I got my first real Pentium
Bought it at the local shop
Played Quake till my fingers ached
Was the summer of '99
Me and some guys from school
Had a LAN and we played real hard
Jonny lost, the network failed
Should've upgraded our thinnet
Oh, when I look back now
Ninety-eight was more fun than XP
And if I had the choice
My kids wouldn't be stuck with chromebooks
I really miss my old PC
From the perspective of “an average person”, ChatGPT is delivering fantastic products.
- For general chat and web search, occasional image editing, small coding work, document review etc. ChatGPT Plus is basically limitless and “just works” since 5.6. I’ve yet to give it some task it cannot do.
- When given sensible instructions, it hardly annoys with weird phrasing, glazing, or annoying constructs.
- The apps are very good (ignoring the initially terrible Codex app)
You can get a lot of Codex usage out of that same sub on top of ChatGPT usage. Its a really good value and you can use that sub in any harness. In OMP I have Sol high as the orchestrator, Sol max as Planner & Reviewer, Luna max as task/coder. Very good setup. I'm on pro now and there are weekends when I use half a week's usage but I'll have 5 or 6 sessions going at once for many hours each day.
I find that subagents usually burn more tokens and take longer, and produce about the same quality. A real killer use-case is using a VERY cheap subagent to do a lot of work, or reviews. Don't be fooled into thinking that a "scout" subagent will gather enough info for a "coder" agent to just start working.
OMP also does a lot of rewinds - where the orchestrator comes up with findings on its own and rolls back to a previous turn with a summary update. I don't know if it always chooses correctly between rewinds and sub-agents, but it seems to do a pretty good job. Luna is SO MUCH cheaper that even if it spends 30K overhead in context its still much less costly, and when they work in parallel its faster too.
> From the perspective of “an average person”, ChatGPT is delivering fantastic products.
It is a honeymoon still, enshittification is coming, who knows how that will look like given how much more expensive to run LLMs backed user experience.
Some back of the envelope calculations:
300 million US users * 20$ a month * 12 months = 72 billion $ a year.
72B$ is some spare change for AI labs. That assuming entire US will be subs which is unlikely and outside of the US there are not many rich countries consuming it, India is the next market, then Brazil and Philippines I think, not super rich counties to say the least. I believe total revenue to just pay for the capex build out by the end 2027 should be on the scale of hundreds of billions a year.
Analysis totally excludes enterprise customer demand and or paid API usage which will only increase as apps integrate this into future knowledge work workflows.
Indeed, that is where the money is. Though enterprise is more focused on efficiently than retail and I'm not sure if they won't drift away from frontier models.
Depends on whether the frontier models can keep on offering better performance. The real efficiency is getting work done faster and better.
Compared to a $100k salary, a few hundred dollars a month is insignificant. If you can make the employee even just a few percent more efficient, it’s worth it.
> If you can make the employee even just a few percent more efficient, it’s worth it.
Are/were you in a position to make such decisions or it is a guess? I'm not but given certain evidence I doubt that few percent will cut it. I know some of the richest companies on the planet from SF Bay Area who won't give lunch for free to their engineers. So I'm not sure about "few percent" :-D 10x we were promised, now that is more interesting but we all know that 10x engineers is nonsense.
On the other hand enterprises are gearing up to pay for shit like $99/user Agent 365, or paying for huge PTU reservations that go almost completely unused on weekends and holidays.
The small square box at the very end of the document, with accompanying text, is just delightful:
> To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you! → [__]
All over the document, you can see Tim Schafer "wasted his time" by adding personality (jokes, graphics, asides) to what is basically an internal document.
I think in 2026 a document lovingly crafted like this would be deemed a great waste of time, lack of efficiency and an affront to shareholder value.
I understand that price also includes the AI stuff, but I’d rather use something like the ChatGPT app directly than go via Kagi for that.
Right now there’s $10 for unlimited search and AI stuff and $5 for limited search and AI stuff.
At what price point could Kagi offer unlimited search and no AI stuff?
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