[cetra3]

~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day.

There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

It doesn't quite sit right in the same way github actions charges per minute: The slower their runners are, the more money they make.

And both of these scenarios there is no user agency to assist with that past a certain point.

[jpalomaki]

> they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers.

Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, where you assume 80% of low volume users will cover the costs for the 20% heavy users

[pbronez]

It’s tricky because there are subtle psychological effects when marginal use directly incurs marginal cost. It makes each use a decision.

When you assemble tools for cognitive work, it’s important that they have low overhead. Thinking about the financial cost of using a tool is a small context switch that slows you down. Thus a bundle of prepaid stuff increases the utility of the service beyond what you’d get with pure pay per use, even though the latter is more economically efficient.

[runnerup]

> they make more money if you have to perform more searches.

Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable.

Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan.

The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.

[endisneigh]

To be fair to same disincentive exists with ads, and any timed work. Ideally you’d be paid per successful search but that’s an intractable problem.