> Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on your plan’s value.
Although I likely won't use Assistant, stuff like this is why I love Kagi. My relationship with them as a customer feels refreshingly transparent; I can't think of any other consumer SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does this make money?" question.
(Compare, say, Discord. It's best in class, but eternally unprofitable - which makes me wary that it might fold or go to hell at the drop of a hat.)
If I already pay for Gemini Advanced (or OpenAI/ChagtGPT Pro), I then have to pay for it again at every service that offers a Pro 2.5 (or 4.1/4o) tier. I should be able to connect my Gemini Advanced access to any service that offers Flash and be able to upgrade. Signing up for a bunch of services is starting to feel like being triple, quadruple or more dipped. Similar to how I am annoyed seeing media content cross licensed to three streaming services and not getting a bill reduction when subscribed to multiple services with the same content.
Instead of vertical software slices, many people are going to want their single “horizontal” agent that they pay for (e.g Gemini Advanced, Claude) and connectivity to all of their other services.
MCP (which I personally think is a mediocre protocol, so it will probably win) as the glue for a bunch of services we OAUTH against and choose when our agents do/do not have access to certain tools.
The idea of a “GPT” App Store from OpenAI was sort of right, but just wrong enough. We are going to have an App Store inside of our preferred AI platform and subscribe/connect our other services from there.
Sam Altman, in a recent Stratechery interview, detailed parts of OpenAI's future strategy that align with your prediction — a persistent, personalized AI. He envisions users interacting with OpenAI not just through core products but also across other applications.
Altman described a key part of the strategy: "...we have this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can take your bundle of credits and your customized model and everything else anywhere you want to go".
This system aims to create a portable AI experience and by virtue, would usurp the vertical software business model that has historically dominated the software economy. A horizontal play, that sits in the middle collecting their tidy sum of the pot will require a very compelling argument. That would require a low barrier to integrate for developers coupled with a value-add proposition that is meaningful and not possible for anyone other than the largest technology companies.
As you know, it’s sort of the Wild West of tech right now. OpenAI is looking to find a territory in the AI landscape and make their stake now, and I think this is the correct strategy. We have seen what being the first to market with a great product can do for the longevity and growth of tech companies - especially the consumer markets. They have the name recognition, forever embedded in the lexicon of the internet, and a great product vision that will lead to critical mass adoption that and what awaits them is the coveted moat, at least in the consumer market, that AI companies have been struggling to find out in the Wild West of AI.
Altman mentioned wanting users to "be able to sign in with your personal AI that's gotten to know you over your life". This sign-in would ideally carry "your memory and who you are and your preferences and all that sort of thing" across different integrated services.
The OpenAI SSO login will be the Trojan horse and later on the app developers will either be incentivized by OpenAI or compelled to integrate their products because of the compelling value proposition it would bring to bare with an integrated personalized AI assistant, complete with its memory and preferences.
Lastly, I suspect this is one of the driving motivations to become a consumer hardware company as there is little to no chance that current players (Apple, Google, Meta) would allow the same 1st party access to their internal API’s would be a requirement for what Altman has laid out for OpenAI moving forward.
It would be ideal for them for LLM access portability to let them offer higher end models and have the end consumer pay directly for the usage.
Id much rather pay for one AI License, and a small fee to each service I use, rather than paying a high tier AI Bonus price at every single service.
Hearing from whom?
They also have ads in the app and they have other monetization features...
And for over a decade most companies talk only about revenue, which is infuriating. Because most startups and tech darlings survive only by continuous infusion of unlimited investor money.
And besides my point was that it's pretty clear what their monetization is and that it's not some mystery
It is not big bad VC either, VC funding while demanding is still lot more forgiving than Private equity or public markets . It is nature of a free economy to be as efficient as possible which in turn makes it affordable and accessible to class of users who would not have been do so before .
It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites being accessible by default :/
Edit: I can zoom in perfectly in my browser - Safari on iPhone - here.
The Kagi widget technically solves this, but without installing a new launcher I can't replace the native Google search bar with the Kagi one.
Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447), hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0
ublock origin enable zoom in all websites
Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?
https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...
His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0">
Our site's been fixed, and I opened a PR upstream.
But they never use it so just fill in a random number.
They don't call you if you live in a cleanly ASCII representable address with zero ambiguity and you don't have to be contacted from customs. Otherwise the courier do use the number.
Google search is trash now (for reasons that aren’t entirely in Google’s control), but for the first decade it was magical how well it could one shot finding relevant data on the web.
For me it's just happened a few times towards the end of the month and I was happy with how they handled the situation.
May be Kagi could also consider rolling over unused search for one month. So if you only did 200 searches, the remaining 100 will roll over to next month so you have 400 searches.
And then the gravy on top is that I fundamentally think that direct payment is a "better" (both from a consumer perspective and from a societal perspective) model than an ad-supported model, so I'm also supporting a company that aligns with that larger philosophical viewpoint.
Most of the population is well served with search funded with ads and tracking. Kagi is for the minority who don’t want that. I’m not sure there is enough if a market between 300 and some other number that would treat search anxiety just to satisfy those who won’t pay $60 a year more to relieve it.
This will replace a chatGPT and Anthropic sub for most everyday users. Their assistant is better than bringing my own keys to a client for most use cases. Just wow.
Please Kagi, don’t take too much of a haircut or let paying for this eat into the core search budget.
Q: I can not access Assistant!
A: We are doing staged rollout beginning with USA, full rollout scheduled by Sunday, 23:59 UTC. This will include other regions and even the trial plan.
For some reason instead of redirecting you to login kagi.com/assistant redirects you to the wiki rather than a login page when you're not logged in.
> An important note: We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for ‘Assistant for All’ is scheduled to be completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.
It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what happens if you use less - for example maybe with a partial rebate on your next billing cycle ?
I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved", currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy, since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract. I'd rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.
6 hours ago most users didn’t have access to this feature at all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a well-built feature.
I’m paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was worth it just for Search. Now they’re giving me $17 worth of value for the same price.
Their margins must be razor thin, and they’re only able to offer this much value because they’re counting on most people not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave rebates, they’d go out of business.
I currently pay for x. Soon I’ll get x + y for the same money.
That’s better.
Kagi rolled out a free feature to its existing customers without increasing the price of their plans. The limits of that plan seem quite generous, as well. The only way I can make sense of the OP's post is that the OP wants the Kagi subscription price to decrease. Perhaps that's fair, but it doesn't make any sense here because you're strictly getting more for your money. If you're paying $10/month for a subscription, yesterday you couldn't use Assistant and today you can for the same $10/month. Placing a cap on how much you can use seems quite reasonable given the service costs money to operate. If you choose not use it, you're no worse than you were yesterday... you can happily go about using the search service you were already paying for.
Is the problem that the free usage isn't unlimited? Is it that not using the free service doesn't reduce the search price? Or is it that those using Assistant more than you appear to be getting more value for their money? I'm not trying to be dense, but I really don't see what's even remotely controversial about this announcement.
Lately, every subscription I have is increasing the fee without giving me anything. Kagi is giving me something extra without charging me any more money. I'm sure the nefarious intention is to make their service more attractive to non-subscribers and grow their userbase, but interests can align.
It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.
The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.
Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.
This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.
If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.
I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.
As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year I’m still being charged for renewing my plan even though I haven’t used a quarter of my allotted searches.
I don’t care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me. Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.
I’m seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the first time in ages.
It's great.
I'd love for BlueSky takes a subscription model, too, so we don't have to think about advertising or sustainability or all that jazz.
Also means the company's interests much more closely aligned with users interests, rather than advertisers interests.
Are you imagining one switch toggle that would disable it at the team account level (or individual account level - in which case it would theoratically still be opt-in and 'available' like it is now).
Genuinly trying to understand the UX of it that would comply with the policy.
Has the option to turn off Auto AI feature.
It might be an good idea to post on their support forum.
I am also curious if you have other restrictions on information sharing, API usage, and what reference documentation to use.
I started to use Perplexity like 1 or 1.5 years ago when it was really good in term of efficiency to find good results with an efficient interface, compared to chatgpt and co. But nowadays I find the assistant response to be not that good at all, with a lot of the links provided or the suggested follow up questions on the same quality as Google SEO top results or ads.
Despite having the paid plan or Perplexity, most of the time I try a request there and then still go to chatgpt or mistral to ask the question again.
For Kagi, when I use the in search ai response, it is mostly good directly.
You can also go straight to the view by visiting `/assistant` and typing your query in there.
I still think preplexity has the AI search stuff down better, but getting both a "legacy style" search AND AI search, Kagi has better value to me imo.
FYI - I use Kagi every day for standard search and love it.
Kagi is the better version of Google search, especially if you learn how to use lenses, bangs, and all these features. Kagi Assistant is great if you‘re happy with basic no-frills chat, i.e. no usable voice input, no image gen, no canvas.
Perplexity is not bad, but somewhat stuck in the middle between ChatGPT/Gemini and search. They provide sources for search results which are somewhat more spot-on than what I‘ve seen elsewhere. For example it could find EV chargers with restaurants for a trip I made along a route, which ChatGPT, Gemini, Kagi Assist failed greatly).
I found refining searches with Perplexity terse and it kept forgetting context once you started to reply. They have an AI generated news feed which lured me into more doom scrolling.
Also, be aware that Perplexity free-tier may collect data about you, which Kagi does not.
Tldr; Kagi is a superior search engine worth paying for. Perplexity seems good at queries that require context but quite expensive.
If a site leaves me disgruntled when I visit it, I block it. If I find it too useful to block entirely (reddit) I lower it. I apply the inverse to sites I enjoy.
I find there are certain sites that have built-in search that sucks. One such example is Dockerhub. In that case, when I want to search for a container on Dockerhub, it may be tempting to use the built-in !dh, but that is no good. Instead I favor the "snap" search: @dh, which will just add "site:hub.docker.com" to you query. This will give much better results than !dh. This can also be combined with the "I'm feeling lucky" bang (!), so you can search for something like "nats @dh !" and end up on the Dockerhub page for NATS - without ever even seeing Kagi if you do it from your URL bar. I do this pattern all the time, usually with Dockerhub and GitHub.
You'll find with the above pattern that you'll start to want to apply this to sites that aren't natively supported as bangs. One such site for me has been Ollama. I added a !ollama to be able to search for models directly. It's also nice because just searching "!ollama" will bring me right to the homepage too, which is useful when I want to check to see if I'm on the latest version.
You'll also find there are subjects where you tend to prefer a small set of sources. Maybe it's some software or tool, or some hobby or something, where you prefer official documentation, maybe some known personal sites you trust, a reddit community, something like that. That's where custom lenses comes in. I personally have a lens for the operating system I use (GNU Guix) (as well as a !p bang to search for packages) which includes official documentation, mailing list archives, IRC archives, things like that. I'm sure there are probably similar subjects in your world that you would enjoy having a more focused search for :)
As for the Kagi Assistant, I pretty much have just wired up an Assistant to use my Guix lens as a search source. That is pretty nice, because I can just ask it general questions like "how do I install nginx?" and get focused and relevant answers, instead of having it go off on how to install it on irrelevant distros.
For bangs I’m pretty sure the default ones might be enough – just use them! Some of my go-to bangs are !gh, !gm for Google Maps (Kagi Maps are sometimes not as good in Asia), !yt, !mdn, and !amo for addons.mozilla.org.
I also have this redirect rule:
^(https://www\.nytimes\.com.*$)|https://archive.ph/2025/$1
I rarely use Kagi search anymore and instead search via assistant. Both it and perplexity give me much better results than I get from a traditional search engine.
I've never been great at getting what I want from search engines. With assistant and perplexity, I type plain English with context and get what I am looking for a large chunk of the time. That's a godsend to me.
I've found things that assistant does that make it worth paying for. I often use perplexity but what I use it for (deep research) isn't valuable enough at the time to pay for.
I like the perplexity iOS app a lot and use it almost exclusively on my phone which isn't enough use to necessitate needing a subscription.
A lot of AI providers operate in black box territory when it comes to limits, which is quite annoying.
I too want to see this soon. As a long time user of Ultimate it isn't uncommon for me to use 5M tokens per month and I have no idea if this will be covered by my subscription now.
Q: Why did Kagi start enforcing the fair use policy?
A: The policy was enforced due to excessive use. For instance, the top 10 users accounted for approximately 14% of the total costs, with some individuals consistently using up to 50 million tokens per week on the most advanced models. Our profit margins are already quite narrow. 95% of users should never hit any usage limits.
Don't think it's fair to call users problematic when they were using the product as advertised. "Unlimited" has a meaning.
I'm sympathetic to that argument, for sure, but it's also just a branding-label to not necessarily be taken literally. There must always be a limit to everything as there's only so much energy in the universe: so, the word 'unlimited', in every real-world physical context, is still with limits.
Read the T&Cs should always be the the advice.
If we make a quick back of the envelope estimation: in the outlier case if those 3 million tokens are mostly output tokens and you always used an advanced model like GPT 4.1 which costs $8 per 1 million output tokens you would be close to hitting the limit that the plan provides ($24 out of $25 worth of tokens).
In pretty much most other scenario's (including a higher proportion of input vs output tokens and mixing in cheaper models) you could be a long way from hitting the limit. For example if you used half of those tokens on GPT 4.1 Mini instead of GPT 4.1 you'd only be roughly halfway to your limit ($14 out of 25$ worth of tokens).
I agree about the need for appropriate wording and advertising, but other than that, the new limits seem entirely reasonable and in line with what other aggregators like Abacus and Poe are doing. The paid plans of the major AI labs themselves always have usage limits too. It simply can't work any other way if you include costly models in the mix.
Love that for $25/mo, you can get access to GPT 4o, Sonnet, and other models along with high-quality search.
Notable issues for me:
- maps (from Mapbox) are really bad. Sluggish performance and lack of information
- barely any info boxes
- no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") gives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result
- no timezone calculations: "10 am PT" in Kagi: "= 10 Pt am (metric petaton attometers)" in Google: "10:00 Freitag Pacific Time (PT) entspricht 19:00 Freitag in ..."
- no search history, which is sometimes really useful to have
Other than that, the search results are really good.
I'm confused why anything else would matter. For example, I'll readily admit that Kagi maps sucks compared to Google maps. But I just use Google for map stuff, and use Kagi for searching. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me that it's a tool which does one thing and does it well.
With good search results I refer to those which normally take you to sites, not just quick lookups like time zone conversion or translations. For example results which point to documentation or GitHub.
Other than that, make sure your region/locale is set correctly (I'm not getting the metric petaton, for example), and for everything else, they have an excellent feedback forum for suggestions/bug reports.
Last time I checked (which admitedly has been a few months, but I haven't seen anything in the changelog/announcements that make me belive things got better), that's not a viable option.
I always keep it as "International" (luckily that's an option!), as setting it to "German" significantly degrades the results as for e.g. technical topics it will rank many rubish German results higher than they should be. Google still has a significant edge in getting the distinction right between regional and technical expertise and how they relate to language.
And I wouldn't care if they dropped maps, I pay for kagi for search and the assistant.
How about a custom Bang for dict.cc?
Bang shortcut could be "dcc" with URL: https://www.dict.cc/?s=%s.
Then you can translate using "!dcc gründonnerstag".
Because they have been working on all those issues. They even have their own translation now.
I even use an Ultimate plan to try out the different models but I use it so rarely that it's probably better to downgrade.
I wonder, what's the upside for the Ultimate plan now? Just better models?
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
Difference #2 - Quality - Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search. Ultimately, model quality will converge to the same place, quality of search results will remain a major difference.
Difference #3 - Privacy - Using models through Kagi is more privacy respecting due to non-training for API calls.
The model they're using for these must not be a very good one, but for most things it's enough, and very fast.
We'll also be sending out a toast message to everyone once it's globally rolled out.
But I'm concerned that this will not rot the business model like that kind of thing happen for other services.
I would have preferred that the full of my subscription cost goes to the core feature of developing the search engine and directly the related feature. And as of today, I pay a separate premium if I'm interested by the AI assistant.
Now, with it being in all subscriptions, and knowing that anyway they can only work by paying the token price per request to all AI providers, it means less of my money going to the search index improvement, and what I'm more worried is that a forced increased of the subscription price in the coming years.
Something like, as you know, our costs are high, so we need to raise the pricing to stay sustainable.
Even if not the best reference, this remind me of Netflix saying look we are adding "videogames" (that no one wants) to your subscription for free, but now we will have to raise our prices, because you know, inflation and all of that ...
The gist is, when you don't use the AI assistant, you still pay the base price, and that money goes to R&D, since your subscription money doesn't go to AI providers in the first place.
For example, I have no interest in AI assistant, and I won't use it. As a result, my support will Kagi won't change.
just takes me to documentation.
Perplexity is also much less flexible than Kagi Assistant. The most customization you can do on Perplexity is answer a few questions about yourself, and hope that the info you add is injected into relevant prompts (spoiler alert: hope isn't very powerful here). With Kagi, I created a lens about a year ago to filter search results down to sources I find useful relating to GNU Guix, which I use for my machines. When Kagi Assistant rolled out (I pay for Ultimate, so I have had this a while) I made an Assistant that only pulls search results from my GNU Guix lens. The practical comparison here between Kagi and Perplexity is that I can go to Kagi and search "!guixc How do I install nginx?" (or simply ask the question in the Assistant interface; the bang will bring me there from search) and I will get back the answer I want. I added info that I use GNU Guix on my Perplexity profile, and there is not a chance that my question would have been answered within the context of GNU Guix as I wanted.
Perplexity is cool, but I found Kagi to simply be more useful.
Kagi can only grow at the pace of incoming revenue.
/s
Moving to a pay-as-you-go model across all their plans might be interesting, but could equally give the wrong impression to some audiences given that it's a pricing strategy usually reserved for budget brands in the consumer space and tends to scare people off.
Would be nice if I had a lay-flat intercontinental jet.
I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite of privacy to me.
Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and try fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming from me.
Why would I go through all that hassle if I can just type my query directly in other search engines?
However, the most important argument here is not the fact that they are legally bound to those privacy commitments (they are), but that their business incentives are fundamentally incompatible with tracking users. For a very niche business with an extremely narrow and homogeneous user base, if they would get caught doing so, it would be game over. The privacy pass feature is available if you don't trust, and you can verify since everything relevant happens client side.
