They’ve introduced a $5/month intro plan, which is half the cost of the previous low tier.
They also added in AI chat at no additional cost, charging based on usage, while everyone else is trying to charge $20 for that alone.
They are pretty transparent on billing, at least for their highest cost items. At the start they would show you how much your searches cost them vs your bill. At one point I cost them more than I paid, so I tossed them some extra money to not be a drain. Now they show how much you cost them in AI tokens, and if you cost them more than you paid, you pay the difference, which feels fair. I think I use the Assistant a lot and only ever use $1-2 in a month.
With search, it did seem like scale came with per-search savings, but my hope with that was it created more margin for them to be healthy, since it didn’t seem like they had much based on what they showed in the settings. And now AI is eating into those margins a bit. I’m pretty happy with how they have handled all that. It’s probably the best $10 I spend each month.
I'm paying, I really find it useful. The rollover option is very fair.
Are there any examples of businesses becoming so successful with the sign-up to a subscription model they lower the prices (would have been a better ask)?
I remember that happening with The Omni Group. They make software for Apple platforms, like OmniFocus. They came out with a sync service, which users had to pay for. Over time they realized it didn’t cost them very much to run, so now it’s free. Of course, they aren’t running a pure subscription business, they make their money selling software.
I think what happens more often is a company will leave the price the same for a long time. While economies of scale may widen their margins, they will use those to protect against future price hikes, as those tend to be supremely unpopular. As inflation makes everything more expensive, the subscription gets effectively cheaper by remaining the same price for 10 years, or whatever it may be. For example, Amazon left Prime the same price for the first 11 years, so as time went on it became a better deal comparatively. Now they seem to raise the price pretty regularly, so that ship has sailed for Amazon.
They’ve introduced a $5/month intro plan, which is half the cost of the previous low tier.
They also added in AI chat at no additional cost, charging based on usage, while everyone else is trying to charge $20 for that alone.
They are pretty transparent on billing, at least for their highest cost items. At the start they would show you how much your searches cost them vs your bill. At one point I cost them more than I paid, so I tossed them some extra money to not be a drain. Now they show how much you cost them in AI tokens, and if you cost them more than you paid, you pay the difference, which feels fair. I think I use the Assistant a lot and only ever use $1-2 in a month.
With search, it did seem like scale came with per-search savings, but my hope with that was it created more margin for them to be healthy, since it didn’t seem like they had much based on what they showed in the settings. And now AI is eating into those margins a bit. I’m pretty happy with how they have handled all that. It’s probably the best $10 I spend each month.
I'm paying, I really find it useful. The rollover option is very fair.
Are there any examples of businesses becoming so successful with the sign-up to a subscription model they lower the prices (would have been a better ask)?
I remember that happening with The Omni Group. They make software for Apple platforms, like OmniFocus. They came out with a sync service, which users had to pay for. Over time they realized it didn’t cost them very much to run, so now it’s free. Of course, they aren’t running a pure subscription business, they make their money selling software.
I think what happens more often is a company will leave the price the same for a long time. While economies of scale may widen their margins, they will use those to protect against future price hikes, as those tend to be supremely unpopular. As inflation makes everything more expensive, the subscription gets effectively cheaper by remaining the same price for 10 years, or whatever it may be. For example, Amazon left Prime the same price for the first 11 years, so as time went on it became a better deal comparatively. Now they seem to raise the price pretty regularly, so that ship has sailed for Amazon.
Do you want Kagi to still be around?