Kagi Blog

I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1]. I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material. I use it all the time. I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search. With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

I learned about a cryptographic interaction that can support that recently (and have spent a lot of time focusing on the idea as a means of procrastination). I don't use Kagi but the context was their Privacy Pass thingie https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass It works similarly to what you'd like: they sign sealed tokens you provide. Later, you can unseal a token and use it without invalidating the signature. It is mathematically too difficult for a classical computer to link the sealed and unsealed token.

I assume you mean because you have to be logged in in order to use kagi? They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must. And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites. I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.

Interestingly enough, Kagi has a new browser, Orion, that's also WebKit-based. Besides the obvious macOS, it's in Alpha for Linux and "in development" for Windows. May the best non-Chromium browser win! https://blog.kagi.com/orion

Yeah, same. I get that people worry about Kagi staying profitable and alive. But honestly the T-shirt thing and the hub align with my understanding of their brand: Hard Way. Kagi takes the hard road that nobody else will. They never cheap out. They keep quality really, really high even when they could drive better margins by lowering their standards to follow the herd. Now, if the company dies because of genuine financial mismanagement, I will be pissed. I rely on Kagi's search and AI offerings. For now, those core offerings keep getting better even with these side quests. For example, their Ki research assistant just left beta: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-assistants

For what it's worth, Kagi has been clear about this vision from the beginning. https://blog.kagi.com/last-mile-for-web-search

Also worth noting, the Kagi assistant is now available to all paid Kagi users. This gives you conversational chat with a few ChatGPT models, Gemini, Llamas, Nova, Deepseek, and other. https://kagi.com/assistant Additional details on the blog post about it. https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all

> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. I don’t use it, but the Privacy Pass [0] thing should actually make it great for privacy if you care more about that than personalization. [0]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

> The unstated downside It is clearly stated in the blog post :) We even considered variations of having some settings preserved in local storage and impact of that on anonymity. Ultimately decided that was not worth it. Check the FAQ section (towards the end) for full details and analysis: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq

I was on the $10 a month plan for a while, but I canceled. Overall the experience of using Kagi was great but not "$10 per month" great compared to free alternatives. On top of that I got the feeling that Kagi is not a super "professional" company; for example by spending huge amounts of money on self-printing useless t-shirts (https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k) or haphazardly suddenly charging tax on subscriptions. What I want most of all from a search engine is to be "internet plumbing" and mainly stay out of my way, and with Kagi I always had the feeling they would suddenly remove/change/add things because of some strong opinion their founder holds. In which case I don't want to be $108 committed for a year.

> it combines some "greater good" principles with the ability to build products and run businesses in a modern competitive market There's also the PBC (Public Benefit Corporation), which in addition to profit / shareholder value explicitly defines positive impact on society as a goal, and exists since 2010 in some states, while in others only since 2022 [1]. But as far as I understand there are no legal requirements or audits that ensure those goals are followed. Kagi (the search engine, popular in the HN community and I'm a happy customer myself) is one example of a PBC [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation [2] https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi#4

For anyone else wondering, they raised $670,000 from 42 small investors in June 2023. Non-traditional fundraise. I agree that spending that money on t-shirts is weird. As a new Kagi subscriber I don't want a t-shirt. I want a thriving search engine. https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round

Found via the great stumbleupon-like https://kagi.com/smallweb/ which feels like the good parts of an early-2000s web. Via https://blog.kagi.com/small-web "Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways"

> after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing... See: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web > but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering. All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to): https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html

They've blogged about it: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials They are aware that it's not within reach for everyone, and hopefully they'll be able to do something about it (likely with scale: more subscribers, means they can slowly lower the prices as they've done: https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes)

I am so proud to be one of Kagi customer. Please check out my 3 favorite features of Kagi: - Small web: a collection of human blogs that you can submit your own. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web - Lens: customized search result https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html - Bang: very similar to DuckDuckGo bang.

Hi Vlad, You might want the blog to prominently link back to https://kagi.com. "Home" took me to https://blog.kagi.com, I tried clicking on the pricing table image, etc. but nothing got me to the actual product. I had to manually enter https://kagi.com to see the product behind the blog.

The recent price reductions [0] were fantastic. But investors always smells fishy to me. Granted I don’t understand much of it, so my nose might be off. 0 - https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes

Probably not accurate anymore but they published a blog post about their first three months (it hasn't been a year yet!) after their official release. It was free during the beta before then. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months Seems like they were at 2600 paid subscribers, but the wording indicates that they were seeing a pretty solid growth rate.

+1. The best search engine out there imo. This is their blog post on how they view AI integration. https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search

If you're only searching for family-friendly stuff Kagi is pretty good (anything NSFW yields no result), but there's no way I'd be willing to pay that much money for a search engine. $5/m for only 200 searches (reminder, 1 page = 1 search. So if you hit "page 2" you just burned yet another search from your quota) is insane. [1] Love it or hate it but Neeva is also on the private search engine market, and you can get unlimited searches for 50€/y. I find their pricing way more reasonable. --- [1] https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing

Ability to block/boost domains as seen in the following link: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features I only know about it because it pops up often on hn. Haven't tried it because at this point I don't want to pay $10 per month for search.

Yeah, ads can be a real pain. Before HNers come in and start criticizing Google, can we have a honest discussion about the best pricing model for search engines these days? Subscription-based search engines like Kagi and Neeva are generating some revenue, but I'm not convinced they'll be profitable in the long run. Kagi is still struggling to pay the dev team's costs [0]. [0]-https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months

Does everything need to be a billion dollar business? Globally, I can easily see enough users sign up to sustain the small team. Their blog post [0] mentiones they calculate they need 25,000 subscribers to sustain themselves. (I'm a paying customer, FWIW). [0] https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#future

> Kagi This seems to be true, but more indirectly. From Kagi’s blog [0] which is a follow up to a Kagi blog post from last year [1]. [0]> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.[^1] [0]> The current interim approach (current as of Jan 21, 2026) [0]> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations. I’m an avid Kagi user, and it seems like Kagi and some other notable interested parties have _already_ been unable to do get what they want/need with Google’s index. [0]> The fact that we - and companies like Stanford, Nvidia, Adobe, and the United Nations - have had to rely on third-party vendors is a symptom of the closed ecosystem, not a preference. Hopefully someone here can clarify for me, or enumerate some of these “third-party vendors” who seem like they will/might/could be directly affected by this. [0] antibabelic > relevant https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search [1] https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search > [^1]: A note on Google’s existing APIs: Google offers PSE, designed…

sure > You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts [...] It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on? i like the service, but spending money on t-shirts seems unreasonable to me. I'm sure there are a dozen things which would benefit from the money and time which were spent on manufacturing clothes. From their own blog post [1]: > The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database which sounds to me like not the best way to spend the company's time also: > why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts all their answers to that question they asked themselves in the same blog post seem silly to me. Go give bonuses to your employees, upgrade devices, make a company event, etc > On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there absolutely not! If i want an AI search result, i go to an AI provider of choice. Again, i don't think that should be their focus > I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me — i cancelled Kagi subscription because i use claude as a search…

How many of those companies are profitable? How many do you think you will see a blog post about in a year or two - “Our Amazing Journey” where they won’t either go out of business or get acquired and their product gets shut down”? From Kagi’s website https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#:~:text=We%20ar… We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month. Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs. That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).

Same, love Kagi. I think the biggest surprise for me was that it is getting frequent improvements. I'm so used to Subscriptions being just a drain. You "buy" the product, and then you pay just to keep using it. Which can feel, emotionally, a bit unappetizing because i'd rather just purchase it fully. The subscription just feels like a money sink with no added value. Conversely i've not had that opinion with Kagi. Not only am i happy with the product, but i the frequent[1] improvements[2] make me feel like i'm buying something newer and better each month. Developments on FastGPT, increasing what i get for my dollar, integration of more features in general. I frankly assume i just joined at a good time, because this pace can't keep up.. right lol? Regardless my Kagi subscription has felt like i'm getting more value each month. From other companies i'd feel lucky to get these advancements, and if i did i'd expect it to cost me more. "5 new features? Welp, i guess i get to buy a Pro subscription tier to access it" or w/e, is what i'd expect. Really can't praise Kagi enough. [1]: within the last couple months, at least, as i'm new to the product and have only been subscribed for 2 months. [2]: You can see some here: https://blog.kagi.com/blog

I'm not sure Kagi has ever used the Bing API, because (according to Kagi) Bing prohibited changing the results, or merging them with others. Apparently Google is expected to provide access to its index via API soon. https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Kagi does something like this: https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop LinkedIn also added a button to report AI slop, but I'm doubtful it would be of much help on LinkedIn since every second post seems to be written by an LLM.