X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service::X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a live-streamed conversation
X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service::X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a live-streamed conversation
Why?
I prefer to be the customer, not the product. When I do a search I get actual search results instead of a page full of ads. I want to support a business model that goes against the idea that being ads supported is the only way to exist on the internet. I found with Kagi I don’t really need other search engines, while DuckDuckGo had me constantly going to Google.
A few months ago my browser reverted to Google for some reason. I did a search, got some results and recoiled a bit, saying, “wtf is all this bull shit.” Then I looked up at the top of the page and I was on Google. After spending several months with Kagi, I don’t know how people put with Google. It’s like the whole world were like the frogs who were cooked my raising the water temp 1 degree at a time. Everyone is overrun with ads, but don’t realize it, because it’s all they know. There’s another away.
I’d give up all my streaming services before I gave up Kagi.
I looked into it, and I am definitely interested. Do you have the unlimited plan? Because I 100% would burn through the other plans very quickly.
I’m on the early adopter professional plan, because I signed up before they changed their plans. There was only 1 option when I signed up. At the time they would show what was paid vs what it cost. I tossed them some extra money once, because they were basically breaking even on me. It looks like they removed that now that they have a more solid pricing model backed by some data. I pay $10/month for 1,500 searches, 500 extra search over the normal professional plan for being an early adopter.
I don’t try and limit myself at all. It’s my default search engine for work, home, and on my phone. At work I’m a software engineer, so I’m searching a lot (though I do spend most of my time in meetings these days). Looking at the last 7 months, my peak was around 1050, with the lowest being 455. If I go over 1,500 it’s 1.5 cents per search, so not a big deal, plus warnings and limits can be set around that.
If you’re interested you can start with one of the lower plans and see what your actual usage is (it shows you by month and by day). If you end up needing unlimited and feel it’s worth it, you can upgrade. It looks like if you’re going over 2,000/month it’s worth the upgrade.
They have some AI offerings too, like page summaries and things. I think those have their own quotas. I should probably try those out more, but really haven’t. They’re making a privacy focused browser as well (currently just on iOS and macOS). They have a maps beta as well. I haven’t used that too much, but I’m all for another Google Maps competitor, they also pull from Apple Maps, so there are options. It has !bang support as well, like DuckDuckGo, but I find I don’t use it that much (but like the option).