I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.
That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.
For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.
There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.
The AI assistant is backed by several different models which IIRC just call out to those providers (Op*nAI API, etc) and rack up tokens in the billing system:
You might be right that the AI cost is included when below the plan price — to that I have to say, give me a fucking cheaper plan that doesn’t implicitly include the cost of AI.
As far as I can tell, you have to completely disable all keyboard shortcuts or else when you press A anywhere that isn’t the search box you get dumped immediately into their AI assistant prompted with whatever you already had in the search bar.
It didn’t track me more than a few pennies, but on principle the several times that happened made me angry.
Apparently some of the news views in search are also easy to dump you into AI land. There’s community CSS add on that hides all that stuff now, but I wish the company would let me just disable the AI traps.
I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.
That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.
For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.
There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.
How do you mean? I don’t think there’s any way to incur charges for AI usages beyond your subscription fee unless you are coding against their API.
The AI assistant is backed by several different models which IIRC just call out to those providers (Op*nAI API, etc) and rack up tokens in the billing system:
You might be right that the AI cost is included when below the plan price — to that I have to say, give me a fucking cheaper plan that doesn’t implicitly include the cost of AI.
https://kagifeedback.org/
Ask/vote for it there, will be useful for others
If you search some people already have. https://kagifeedback.org/d/6842-non-ai-unlimited-plan/39
And… it’s not a priority for them, maybe they’ll charge you $5 to disable AI features though 🙃
Hey, Good job not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What specifically do you think is hard to avoid? I’ve never accidentally triggered a quick answer, personally
As far as I can tell, you have to completely disable all keyboard shortcuts or else when you press
Aanywhere that isn’t the search box you get dumped immediately into their AI assistant prompted with whatever you already had in the search bar.It didn’t track me more than a few pennies, but on principle the several times that happened made me angry.
Apparently some of the news views in search are also easy to dump you into AI land. There’s community CSS add on that hides all that stuff now, but I wish the company would let me just disable the AI traps.