Privacy

Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven't seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:

-- you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well

-- the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They've kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They've said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.

-- Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate

-- Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps

-- I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls

-- I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free

-- they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I've read its a legit implementation)

In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.