I love Kagi and have been a very happy subscriber for like a couple years now.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
I'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use, and programatic api use/agents can easily 100x that, performing dozens of searches for one user query. So either Kagi plan price increases and API calls then get included in the price (but then this impacts all users even those not using agents) or there is a pay what you use mechanism for API (which there is).
Any API use given away for free eats into Kagi's (already slim) margins, and unlike VC funded businesses, for Kagi money has to come from users or Kagi doesnt exist. It is a reality of running a user-funded business. If the user doesn't pay for something, Kagi has to.
Yeah the agent API access part is kind of lame. I do think i will start paying for Kagi search API at some point though. The search quality and ability to surface small blogs and sources which other search engines miss is probably well worth the cost.
I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.
I knew Kagi was essentially a meta-search provider (they use lots of indexes to try and produce a more accurate search result), but wasn't aware they use a SERP provider with Google results. Uruky does and it seems to be offered upfront for users that want a more Google-like experience. I'm wondering where you found that out?
They have. Look in your account, it's in usage. If your usage exceeds what you have paid you will get told.
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic's flagship model with always-on adaptive
thinking ($$$$$). Best for deep reasoning, agentic
coding, and long-horizon work.
Cost $$$$$
Quality ●●●●●
Speed ●●
They do, it’s capped at whatever your subscription cost is. But if you don’t have Ultimate the models are cheap and it’s hard to spend it all on assistant use.
For some reason after latest MacOS update (27.2) Kagi extension for Safari started failing frequently. I have Kagi configured to redirect Google, but now I just see Google search show up and stay there. It only redirects if I click the Kagi extension button myself. Seems like a bug, but happens so often that it really ruins the experience.
The extension is open source and macOS changes do interfere with it working. Apple is not making it easy. It is one of the reasons we created Orion - same lightweight, native Safari experience but integrated with Kagi.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, the only non-Kagi workflow I end up using frequently is !gm instead of using the Kagi maps. Hopefully that gap closes up in the future.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.
You're saying you'd love to use Kagi at $7/month, but flatly refuse to do so at $10/month, which is what their unlimited Professional option costs? Really?
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
I believe very strongly that Russia started a completely unjustified war of agression against Ukraine, and that our moral, political, monetary, and military aid (through the sale of weapons, not direct involvement) should be firmly on the side of the Ukrainians.
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
Kagi pays Yandex for search results. It's only one of many inputs but some of the money you pay to Kagi does go to Russia. Kagi's stance on this is that product quality is more important than "geopolitics". It's an extremely disappointing take to use "geopolitics" as a euphemism for "supporting genocide and wars of aggression", which is what doing business with any Russian entity is.
I love Kagi. I especially appreciate how it pushes back against AI slop and makes the web feel more human again. I haven't looked back at Google since switching. The search results are consistently better.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
I think Kagi is a cool idea but I just don't have a strong usecase for it. I don't find myself googling things as much as I used to, and if anything, when I am googling things they just aren't that important. I end up going directly to certain websites instead.
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
I've found the assistant, particularly the android app, to be buggy as all hell. Perhaps it's fine in the browser but as a heavy phone user I couldn't make it work anymore.
Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
How many of those people don’t use an ad blocker? I know a lot of people who put up with that web experience, and it boggles the mind. I digress. It’s not as if showing ads has somehow funded a better search experience, if anything ads go up and quality goes down is what I see. I pay for YT Premium. I would also pay for ad-free, more controllable, Google Search.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Every single time I accidentally use Google I am shocked at how terrible it is. People just haven’t seen the alternatives. I finally setup a family subscription to get my wife and kids on Kagi and they don’t want to go back to Google now.
I don't think I agree with that but I think ads and slop you get from the "free" alternatives are more damaging in subtle ways that people don't appreciate. I also pay to remove ads from just about everything I use and am shocked at just how much better that makes my life.
Yes, sir(s)! Using a search engine without ads is such a life improvement that it’d be a steal at twice the price.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
Use a meta-search engine like SearXNG [1] and you're searching not only ad-free but also - if you choose your sources right - mostly bias-free as far as that is possible. You'll get the results Google filters out but others show, those which Kagi doesn't want you to see but others show, those which those others don't want you to see but Google or Kagi or fill_in_the_blanks show.
regardless of whether the ads are "working" (what does that even mean?), they're additional cognitive load; things my eyes see and add to the overall din that the web has fallen to. I use adblock, but even then, the search results on supposed privacy respecting search engines might be influenced by sponsors for the simple reason that the incentives are not aligned.
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
I tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
hey quick question, what part of Hermes were you using for search? Do they have a similar web portal to Kagi's Assistant or is it more like the AI overview below the search bar?
I am running it locally at home with tailscale for access outside of my home network. I added a tavily key for search and pageloads. There are various FE projects that can connect to Hermes, they also have a frontend, but it's not a "search" interface.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
Counterpoint: I use Kagi Assistant on the $10/mo plan for literally everything I would have used Google for before and have never burned my monthly credits.
I think you’re objections are fair and real so I won’t dismiss them
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
It being useful is entirely orthogonal to the original commenter’s (and my) issue with it: money going to them is money being used to bomb my family’s home.
Exactly! I too prefer only FSB approved information.
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.
Huh? I assume you're being sarcastic but I don't go on Yandex looking for news. I said it's a useful tool for circumventing western censorship. For example copyrighted info, info from outlawed political groups (western designated terrorists), or rich people info censored under various defamation or "right to be forgotten" court orders.
Isn't the whole point of this announcement that you don't need an account? The 50 searches they mention is just client side stored. if you don't store cookies for kagi.com you have unlimited searches.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
This said, it's a good offer. You can switch between many models quickly. They are rated by quality, speed and price, and it's shown with orange dollar symbols for price and bullets for speed and quality. Example:
https://orionbrowser.com
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
May I recommend a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC[0], with a YubiKey[1] and some folder synchronization across machines?
[0]: https://keepassxc.org/
[1]: https://keepassxc.org/docs/#faq-yubikey-howto
FWIW I find Kagi's quick AI responses pretty handy, just chuck "?" at the end of your query to access them. I also appreciate that, unlike Google, Kagi lets you choose exactly when you want AI to answer and when you don't.
But I do not see in the slightest how boycotting Kagi, or any other company who technically does business with some entity in Russia, helps the Ukrainians. Avoiding money to their businesses directly involved in the war efforts (arms, etc)? Sure, I get that. But yandex is only involved in the sense that the entire Russian economy is in some technical sense involved. I don't believe in punishing random Russians or Russian companies for the actions of their authoritarian, despotic government.
And to whatever extent it would have a miniscule impact, I believe that the impact it has on pushing tech companies more broadly towards user-first and user-aligned behavior far outweighs that. That isn't to say that that goal is more important than Ukrainians winning the war, it's not, or even very close, but the magnitude of difference more than balances the importance of the cause. Furthermore, the way we as westerners can actually make a difference is telling our politicians that we stand with Ukraine. A single phone call or letter to your representative would MASSIVELY outweigh a subscription to Kagi. }
So have you messaged your representative? If not, then I find this performative, and in either case, I am highly skeptical that it makes any practical difference.
As always, I'm open to having my mind changed.
OP in the linked thread wanted to boycott Russia and Russian businesses. The “context” is that Kagi gives money to Yandex.
The answer from them : we are unimpressed by world politics.
Man… they are on my short list now.
(Not OP)
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
[0] https://kagi.com/smallweb/
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
- Really high SNR when searching about topics I am not a subject matter expert on.
- Really good at finding prior art on a topic while not necessarily limited to papers conferences and patents (e.g. finding obscure blog posts on a hobby project that actually is relevant prior work).
Arguably this can be achieved with frontier models but my experience is that Kagi is vastly more exhaustive and well I don't need to ask for references because they are indexed in the search itself.
Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.
Maybe it’s a situation where the frog slowly got boiled, or maybe we have rose tinted nostalgia glasses and search is actually better now than it used to be? Even with ad blockers, they’re determined to ram shopping/promoted results into unrelated queries and I’m fed up using verbatim mode. You used to at least get Wiki results fairly high up, no longer it seems. And every software-related search returns GeekForGeeks slop instead of the actual docs. And they wonder why traffic is going to agents?
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
No need to cast shade on others who aren't like you.
[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
The fact that I pay for search or email (proton) is not a proof that the companies are not doing something in secret, but it is somewhat necessary in the trust calculus that I am paying for a specific service to end up getting that service (that is to say, ad free, and not intentionally biased search results).
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.
If you're looking for something more typical of search + AI, DDG is probably the next best. If you're looking for a search assistant that will find you a direct link to the leaked gta 6 footage that people are talking about or to summarise a comparison of 2 oss libs, Hermes is probably the one you're after.
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
Remember their “early adopter” drama? Wasn’t their only drama.
How is funding america any better?
Also, news.pravda.com publishes only the Truth in the English language. It's the Russian equivalent of Truth.social, which of course exclusively publishes the Truth. It's in the name, don't you see.
Ps. I just found out there is website called Pravda.social.