z64
Joined 2 years ago
Joined 2 years ago
The reason for this boils down to the following observations:
- Cost of operation at scale varies wildly between these, making it complicated to operate and manage cash flow
- Complexity for the consumer gets unruly as arbitrary things are limited to our fixed brackets of standard/pro/ultimate, we'll need some crazy matrix to explain what is included in each one
- Apprehension in our customer base about paying for things they don't want, chiefly AI related features. Some people just want search and don't want to pay for anything else, even if its included for free.
Itemizing our ecosystem addresses each of these by letting people pay for what they want, and ignore what they don't. If you want Kagi mail, you just get Kagi mail - there is no gymnastics of "I want Kagi mail, but I need extra storage so I need ultimate, but I don't need Assistant stuff, ...". From a business POV it will cleanly fund each initiative without everything competing for the same $10.
This is still on the whiteboard and not set in stone - so don't take what I'm saying as gospel - but it is generally where our heads are at in terms of managing the complexity of our offerings, cost of operation, and consumer piece of mind. It's a very difficult problem to navigate!
Edit: I mention Kagi Mail here, some people may not know but it is in a closed-ish beta at the moment - we hope to bring it to market by EOY!
We added AI features to the existing plans at no extra charge. The only thing we preempted was our Ultimate plan (which we initially offered with literally zero extra perks!), anticipating that LLMs would become more capable and popular and require a higher margin to operate at scale.
But, there are already plenty of services that proxy Gemini pages so that you can read them in conventional browsers, as well as search engines for Gemini content.
Is this along the lines of what you have in mind - any other active efforts you're aware of that you think we should look into?
Most "cost saving engineering" is involved in finding cases/hueristics where we only need to use a subset of sources and omitting calls in the first place, without compromising quality. For example, we probably don't need to fire all of our sources to service a query like "youtube" or "facebook".
Marginalia data is physically consolidated into the same infra that we use for small web results in our SERP, but also among other small scale sources besides those two. That line is simply referring directly to https://kagi.com/smallweb (https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb).
It's also a space that our founder has already been leasing for the better part of 10 years(?), long before Kagi was even a thing. As others have pointed out, this is Serbia, not SF - it's very cheap in relative.
So in perspective,
- a handful of our team just got a nice office for daily use together in person
- it is a "home base" that others in Kagi can freely use as they travel; we're already planning some "jams" to host there in 2026 to get major features over the line in person :)
- our community can engage with us there as well, we love our customers! online engagement is a very suffocated and transactional space
- it really isn't that expensive
It's all net positive to us in terms of investment in our own people and the community.
What do you perceive as the risk to "trusting" Orion in this case?
edit: Sandboxing the app also further reduces the surface area for "trust", though I'm unfamiliar with MacOS as a platform when it comes to that.
There's a lot of different reasons that people ask for open sourcing of Orion / software in general; could I ask you to expand a bit more as to which issues being open source would address for you?
I can assume of course, but I'd rather listen to you articulate it, even if it's usual reasons.
> also they blocked my vpn's another big nono
Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to [email protected] with details and we will see what we can do.
Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.
1. We have a diverse set of upstream sources. It would require all of them to be "compromised" for our results to completely tank.
2. We have a "crawler-lite" that solely collects info on page quality - number of ads/trackers detected, page speed, etc. - and we take that into account when ranking the results, generally nudging them down the page if "cleaner" ones can be found.
3. Our sole source of income is our users, and we actively respond to impacts in search quality that our users submit to us on our feedback form. If they are not happy with the results quality, then we are out of business.
Put simply: Our technology and business model is completely aligned to resist "enshittification". We have no reason to bias results or "sell out" to anyone.
With the momentum we've gathered, we are also taking first steps to building our own full scale index[1], both as a valuable contribution to the ecosystem of search and a contingency to reduce our reliance on 3rd parties.
[1]: Help us build it! https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html
Thank you for your support.
- Zac