[palunon]

> Any company that doesn't do regional pricing is only interested in doing business with rich countries. Which sucks but is understandable. I wish they were more honest about it though.

This may be true if your cost per client/customer/etc is either negligible (such as with digital goods delivery), or dependent on their country (eg. retail).

Here, the bulk of their cost is computing resources, and they (according to their profile page) don't even make enough to cover it with the current price. I don't think this cost would go down with the customer location.

Yeah, it sucks a lot that people in rich countries can afford things people in other countries cannot, but that's kinda what "rich country" means.

[fnordpiglet]

I’m curious about their economics. I would assume there’s a huge upfront fixed cost but the marginal unit cost is tiny. They may not be breaking even or run at even, but that (I expect) is because they’re struggling to overcome that first hump of the fixed cost, but at the margin they’re doing well. I would be flabbergasted if my monthly is going to pay for my search transactions rather than the ability to execute any search at all. In that model you can in fact offer regional pricing as long as there’s a critical mass sufficient to justify the localization and regional edge deployments. You can go even further and let larger (in dollar space) regions subsidize smaller regions while they grow critical mass. Some companies I’ve worked at felt offering their service globally was worth the depressed margins even if they never made it make economic sense simply because it was useful enough - but also it creates a solid global brand. Anyway Kagi is great and I wish them the best of fortunes.

[matkoniecz]

Kagi is not having own index and is a proxy. They pay to use indexes of actual search engines and this is not cheap that they process and display to users.