alt Hacker NewsNo, and it's a real problem for free and trial tiers for services like this.
When a real user is going through the trial period, those 50 searches get them familiar with the tool. When their usage runs out, they're forced to decide if they want to pay to continue or invest the work into replacing it.
AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening. The current favorite strategy is to have your AI set up access to all of the different search providers with free tiers and then rotate among them to avoid having to pay for anything.
Defeats the purpose of the free tier.
> Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening.
Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.
> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.
That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.