Note that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago):
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
Just been reading about them - they haven’t taken venture funding - so I expect they don’t have the same pressure to 10X every 6 months.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
If you have the skills and the drive to successfully launch a good startup, then probably you won't be satisfied with keeping it a small time affair. Either you try to expand or you sell it and go make a new startup.
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.
I'm assuming they're somewhere north of $5m ARR and that's not a tiny number, even at a thoroughly sane P/E value you're looking at $50m+ of company value.
I somehow doubt the usual approximations are working here.
Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands.
But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
The small team is going to burnout soon. I checked there hiring description and it says something around the lines of expect a lot of work with little rest.
Search isn't that business since staying small means you won't be able to create a good index of the world. And you won't have enough resources for your browser.
Except Kagi often delivers better results than the modern, Ad, SEO and AI generated stuff that google delivers nowadays. And the most important selling point: You can block certain domains which vastly improves the results.
For me it is a great index, much better than all the alternatives. Especially against Google that is now filled with AI and Ads. Sometimes so bad, you really have to scroll down, to get to the first non-Ad link.
I love Kagi, and have been a proud user for almost a year now. Lately, however, the more I read about Vlad and the variety of things the company is working on, the more I get worried. My (potentially naive) hope is that more companies enter this sector of paid search engines and the competition helps iron out the kinks. I want nothing more than a good set of options to choose from.
Same. Happy Kagi user, and very happy to pay for search now I've tried it.
Hopefully, now that they've proven that you can create a profitable company from doing this, more will follow and we'll get a proper ecosystem.
Like others, I'd prefer to see Kagi succeed at being the best possible search engine and nothing else, than try and do the Google thing and do everything.
I’d be much more at ease with their long term prospects if they begun the process of transitioning to a cooperative or steward-ownership, so that they’re less at risk of CEO-capture.
I mean I'm fine with them as they are now, corporate-structure-wise. What happens if Kagi starts to suck? I stop paying for it and move on with my life, so rather than worrying about what could happen, I'll just enjoy it for what it is now.
If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
I'm worried about certain projects, like maps, which while pretty, I still never use because it lacks basic functions like stackable filters when searching for restaurants, or navigation of any sort.
Also am worried about the move to mail, I already have fastmail, and kagi would need to create a heck of a mail client for me to even consider switching. I'd much rather have a company that does search very well, a company that does mail very well, and a good communication between the two.
And I also have less tangible worries about Vlad's demeanor when I see some of his writing in the feedback forum or discord. It comes across as ambitious but not very circumspect, but maybe that's what's necessary to make it in this sector. I won't pretend to have enough experience to offer much opinion on the matter, all I can say is that its unsettling at times.
Some people might have issue with their push into LLM AIs with their Assistant. I personally don’t care for it and am happy that by not using it I’m not subsidising other peoples use of the paid APIs they use. But I’ve seen some people take issue with the development time being taken up by it at all.
I've been using paid email (fastmail) for quite a long time and it's fine, I use it dozens or hundreds of times a day and it's around $4 a month. Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week (based on trying their free 100 queries) if subscribed. Otherwise Duckduckgo suffices. I'm satisfied with duckduckgo in a way that I could never be with any "free" email service since DDG doesn't require a signup and doesn't supply long term storage.
I never understood why cryptomining never took off. The biggest issue I have with paying for anything on the internet is that I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go. If a service mines on a user’s machine, they just pay for it indirectly via their electric bill.
I guess the problem probably has to do with the value of the GPU cycles being lower than the served content. This is most apparent in the case of AI; e.g. if the mining lasts as long as the session, and the server runs 2 GPUs while the user is only running 1, then you can’t complete the “payment” unless the mining continues beyond the length of the session.
Look at the actual numbers. There‘s a large percentage of mobile users. Then there are users on laptops with iGPUs.
To crypto mine even 1 cent would take forever.
>...I don’t want to have to enter my payment details everywhere I go
That problem has been solved for anybody who wants it solved, through Apple Pay and Google Pay, or even the built-in feature in the browser for remembering credit cards.
Normal people absolutely would not accept websites hi-jacking their computer to mine crypto and hardware manufacturers like Apple would swiftly implement measures to protect users from those freaks.
I feel like I'm the only person who doesn't really see the appeal. I have subscribed multiple times in the past, including a free trial for three months that recently ended. It wasn't bad, but when the trial ended I just switched back to DDG and kind of... didn't think about it again?
For me part of it is supporting a project that is worth getting behind. I like that someone goes against the big ad-supported players in a field where it would seem impossible.
Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top.
I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
One of my issues is that I just don't want to have to log into search. I use a bunch of different devices each day, some of which I control and some of which I don't, throughout the course of my work day. I don't want to have to log into Kagi on each one. It's much easier to just use a search that doesn't require a login.
Plus, it seems like having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person. It's probably easier for them to associate my activity with me when I log in than it is for DDG or Google to track my activity when I'm not logged in and can't be easily distinguished from the dozen other people that used that computer that day.
I have DDG as the default search in Safari (because Kagi is not an option, maybe it requires profit sharing with Apple?) and I often end up using DDG out of convenience while being a Kagi subscriber.
I agree there is not a lot of differentiation between stock Kagi search and DDG. DDG still has a few ads but it's not that annoying, perfectly usable.
Kagi's assistants are pretty interesting though. Recently I asked it to find back a post that I vaguely remembered. It managed to generate a bunch of Kagi searches with different keywords and narrow it down to an old tweet.
For Safari you just install their extension and it redirects your default search engine to Kagi. Works fine for me on iOS and macOS. But yeah it’s super frustrating that Apple doesn’t let you set any arbitrary search engine.
Then maybe it is just not for you, completely fine :). I used DDG in the past, but didn't see a big improvement (it is better than Google though). Kagi really changed it for me and so I'm a paying user since a year or so.
I really like kagi's regex redirects on search results; keeps old.reddit.com working on my iPhone. I also take advantage of their search filters and delisting bad urls that I don't like in search results.
DDG is mostly rebranded Bing. The problem is the quality of search results isn't very good compared to Google / Kagi. But it could depend on what you use it for.
I love and respect what Kagi is doing and I was a customer for years, but I recently canceled my subscription.
I found that have two main use cases:
1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.
2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.
I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.
Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.
For your first case, why not use the “?” operator to trigger an LLM response, or use Kagi Assistant (which gives you access to pretty much all the different models you might want to use)?
Thanks. I did not know this, but it triggers a different problem. Many of my LLM queries are for work. My company has data protection agreements with OpenAI, but not with Kagi. These matter more for LLMs than raw search.
For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.
I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).
760 600 queries per day. That’s about 8.8 queries per second.
Per user it’s about 15 queries per day. I’m sure there will be some that are incredibly active and some that aren’t active at all, but 15 per day seems quite reasonable.
I think so too. Apparently I have an overall mean of 26 queries/day, with the lowest month the past year being 19 queries/day and the highest 35 queries/day. Most of this is during the weekday with software development work, but I also make web searches for all kinds of other things in my spare time.
I genuinely thought it would be higher, but I suppose bang patterns don't count.
(Posting this mostly so that people who are curious about subscribing to Kagi can get a sense of how many queries they're likely to need to use.)
Date (UTC) AI Tokens AI Cost (USD) Searches
Jun 2025 0 0.000 141
May 2025 0 0.000 743
Apr 2025 0 0.000 723
Mar 2025 0 0.000 621
Feb 2025 0 0.000 556
Jan 2025 10,692 0.000 1,189
Dec 2024 0 0.000 805
I’ve been measuring my token count and I believe they are making a small amount on me even though I’m not holding back my AI usage. I do pick the cheaper and faster LLMs when I can, but mostly to avoid the waiting of heavy models with extended thinking.
You're probably aware, but they recently added the actual cost of used tokens on the Billing page. This is much better than the token count on its own.
Readit News
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi
Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
From their site:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
If you can bootstrap it yourself then there's no need to do this, but those that bring in investors will need an exit.
Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Or the newer version:
> My point was not about copycats, it was about platformization. Apps that you "live in" all day have pressure to become everything and do everything. An app for editing text becomes an IDE, then an OS. An app for displaying hypertext documents becomes a mail reader, then an OS.
So in turn, every product becomes bloatware that needs more money to maintain and more users to get more money.
Businesses rarely remain stable, no matter if they're startups or not. Because that wouldn't make any sense. Either they shrink or they grow. You can call this the law of midrange businesses.
Consider a midrange hotel:
Either the owner cares about his business and continually improves the facilities and the experience for the guests. Soon the hotel will have a good reputation and will constantly be full. So the natural next step is for him to increase prices, because there is the demand and also he has higher operating costs. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is a high-end hotel.
Or the owner does not care about his business and continually lets things decay and become a worse experience for the guests. Maybe because he wants to save on operating and investment costs. Soon the hotel will have a bad reputation and the owner will decrease prices to attract guests, then further cut costs because cheaper guests don't demand much. Repeat this process over the years and the midrange hotel is now a low-end hotel.
And this happens in all businesses, because in the end they are run by people. If you'd love for companies to get profitable and remain small-ish, then you have to make such a company.
American companies, startups in particular, have terrible support. It's really nice to have actual contact with someone when an issue arises.
Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands.
But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
[1]: https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-t...
Hopefully, now that they've proven that you can create a profitable company from doing this, more will follow and we'll get a proper ecosystem.
Like others, I'd prefer to see Kagi succeed at being the best possible search engine and nothing else, than try and do the Google thing and do everything.
If nothing else, Google taught me that just because something is great today doesn't mean it will necessarily be great tomorrow. I can't get attached.
Also am worried about the move to mail, I already have fastmail, and kagi would need to create a heck of a mail client for me to even consider switching. I'd much rather have a company that does search very well, a company that does mail very well, and a good communication between the two.
And I also have less tangible worries about Vlad's demeanor when I see some of his writing in the feedback forum or discord. It comes across as ambitious but not very circumspect, but maybe that's what's necessary to make it in this sector. I won't pretend to have enough experience to offer much opinion on the matter, all I can say is that its unsettling at times.
However, is there really no other model than these two, i.e. being 100% the product vs. paying the "full price" of the search?
Do people really use web search that little? According to the stats Kagi shows me, I make about 50-100 web searches every day on average.
I guess the problem probably has to do with the value of the GPU cycles being lower than the served content. This is most apparent in the case of AI; e.g. if the mining lasts as long as the session, and the server runs 2 GPUs while the user is only running 1, then you can’t complete the “payment” unless the mining continues beyond the length of the session.
That problem has been solved for anybody who wants it solved, through Apple Pay and Google Pay, or even the built-in feature in the browser for remembering credit cards.
Normal people absolutely would not accept websites hi-jacking their computer to mine crypto and hardware manufacturers like Apple would swiftly implement measures to protect users from those freaks.
And no, there is only those 2 solutions.
Features like boosting the niche forums I browse for search results is just a bonus on top.
I agree that I could go back to DDG and not feel like I am missing too much, but that doesn't bother me.
Plus, it seems like having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person. It's probably easier for them to associate my activity with me when I log in than it is for DDG or Google to track my activity when I'm not logged in and can't be easily distinguished from the dozen other people that used that computer that day.
Yes, this is annoying. They make it as easy as they can (QR code login, session links) but it's still a speedbump.
> having to login is inevitably makes it easier for them to associate activity with a specific real-like person.
That's a legitimate concern. Kagi added Privacy Pass support to mitigate it
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
I agree there is not a lot of differentiation between stock Kagi search and DDG. DDG still has a few ads but it's not that annoying, perfectly usable.
Kagi's assistants are pretty interesting though. Recently I asked it to find back a post that I vaguely remembered. It managed to generate a bunch of Kagi searches with different keywords and narrow it down to an old tweet.
It does indeed, as was revealed during the Google Search antitrust case in the DDG testimony.
Wikipedia first. No Pinterest, no W3Schools, no Fox etc etc.
They have a nice list for suggestions.
I stopped using duckduckgo after they censored tankman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
I found that have two main use cases:
1) Search - It is nice that Kagi search is less SEO spammed. That a big appeal. However, I don't reach for a search engine when I have a topical question anymore. I reach for something like o3 with search, so I don't need to dig through a bunch of articles. Over the last few years my pure search volume has dramatically reduced.
2) Maps - I travel a lot. When I toss a business into the search bar, 90% of the time I want to see it on a map. Google's Maps experience is just far superior to Kagi's. I find that I end up typing maps.google.com more often than I am happy Kagi ran the search.
I don't mind paying for a product; it just didn't work for me.
Side note: I personally dislike that their favicon looks like a "g" for google. It's always confused me.
For my personal workflow, I don’t see the appeal of having a separate setup if I’m just going to use the same underlying models anyway.
2) Yeah this is the one thing I still use google for. Though they did recently update Kagi maps (a weeka ago I think?).
I also find significantly less "vibe written" smut on Kagi. I'm not sure if they are targeting it specifically, or if it's getting corralled by some other metric (like ads+trackers).
Per user it’s about 15 queries per day. I’m sure there will be some that are incredibly active and some that aren’t active at all, but 15 per day seems quite reasonable.
I genuinely thought it would be higher, but I suppose bang patterns don't count.
(Posting this mostly so that people who are curious about subscribing to Kagi can get a sense of how many queries they're likely to need to use.)
It seems that Kagi isn't expecting that things will change much [2].
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/bing-microsoft-api-support-endin...
[2] https://kagifeedback.org/d/7107-microsoft-bing-retiring-sear...