[nifoc]

They have updated the FAQ section of the announcement to directly address this (very, very valid) point:

> Q. Didn’t you say in September that current subscibers will be grandfathered in?

> A. Yes we did say that in September. We are sorry that we have to walk back on that promise and we should have done a better job at communicating the pricing change debate that has been going on for over three months with our community.

> A lot of things changed in the meantime that we could not anticipate and predict, namely increase in search costs and popularization of generative AI which further increases the cost and making us lose even more money per user than before. That is not sustainable for a bootstrapped startup and we had to make the next best decision.

> The decisions made (the price change and cancellation of grandfathering) is exactly the necessary step to keep us in the business of search, aligning incentives between us and users, and keeping the best interest of our users in mind.

> We did the best we can, and we will still going to grandfather in everyone for up to a year on the old plan, and then on a special plan after that indefinitely (which still loses us money, just less). Discussion about this was long and hard and we made the best possible decision given our abilities and the circumstances.

This is so incredibly disappointing and basically confirms that we're (at least in part) paying for their AI experiments - something that I personally am not at all interested in.

[version_five]

There was a thread here [0] a month ago about the AI stuff at Kagi, my take was commenters were overall enthusiastic about it. At the time I said I wouldn't pay for it [1] and got a bunch of replies telling me how valuable it was.

I really want Kagi to succeed, I've been following the results of the pricing change closely because it seems like it's not going well and I don't want them to go out of business. I hope it will convince them to drop the AI stuff, or at least confirm that there's strong evidence it will pay off somehow, not just the hype that makes everybody fawn over llm stuff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646389

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34647775