alt Hacker NewsI'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
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Others have argued the point at depth, but its somewhat more simple than that.
Is it plausible that Kagi's financials require them to run a tighter ship than established players?
Conversely, is it plausible that they are so popular that they can afford to be deaf to the negative UX of the extra sub?
I would suggest that the answers to those, and a quick survey of the heavy costs agentic use has imposed on site operator over the past few year5, suggest that this is a reasonable compromise that keeps costs down for the average user and moves agentic users to the API-fee paradigm that is already rather common.
I mentioned this in another thread. There's clearly a market for an agentic search engine for home/on-premise LLMs. I can download whatever frontier model, but I still have to crawl the web if I want it to have the latest information.
Yeah the agent API access part is kind of lame. I do think i will start paying for Kagi search API at some point though. The search quality and ability to surface small blogs and sources which other search engines miss is probably well worth the cost.
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Because Kagi plans are/were priced for human use, and programatic api use/agents can easily 100x that, performing dozens of searches for one user query. So either Kagi plan price increases and API calls then get included in the price (but then this impacts all users even those not using agents) or there is a pay what you use mechanism for API (which there is).