The "fair use" part takes a lot of place in this article.

It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what happens if you use less - for example maybe with a partial rebate on your next billing cycle ?

I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved", currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy, since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract. I'd rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.

It’s the exact opposite. They are incurring a huge amount of risk with this.

6 hours ago most users didn’t have access to this feature at all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a well-built feature.

I’m paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was worth it just for Search. Now they’re giving me $17 worth of value for the same price.

Their margins must be razor thin, and they’re only able to offer this much value because they’re counting on most people not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave rebates, they’d go out of business.

As an existing happy subscriber to Kagi, this statement is illogical.

I currently pay for x. Soon I’ll get x + y for the same money.

That’s better.

It’s probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your subscription price if you don’t perform searches in a given month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other company with a subscription works.

It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.

The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.

Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.

This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.

Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users!". Their users are people paying for what up until now was just their search service. They're now rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off than you were yesterday.

If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.

I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.

That is a fair point. Considering the alternatives and realities Kagi is way too cheap for the life improvement it provides.

Is it fair enough to ask your favorite restaurant to lower the bill because you didn't eat the two last franch fries ?

Yeah I concur.

As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year I’m still being charged for renewing my plan even though I haven’t used a quarter of my allotted searches.

I don’t care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me. Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.

I’m seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the first time in ages.