tbf 95% of the time when I get a gift card these days it's Amazon or a big retail chain, that ain't exactly a deep cut in the gift department either.
We should probably normalize Chinese Red envelopes because honestly I'd take a nice envelope with a hand written note and some crisp bills over the annoying gift cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_envelope)
Also some people struggle to spend money on themselves without guilt. Gift cards absolve that guilt as they can buy that thing without feeling bad about it
Same reason they gift you a book instead of a can of petrol. By giving you a gift card, they're forcing you to buy something sold at a specific store chain, not to buy more petrol.
It can also be a way to make sure e.g. “fun money” gifts are actually spent as intended, getting around things like sense of responsibility, overbearing spouses, etc making the recipient feel obligated or pressured to spend it some other way.
I’m 100% with OP on this. So many posts on the front page have names like “Hamburger — a tool for doing a thing.” These names are neither memorable nor distinctive, good luck trying to look them up later.
They have fixed costs per query. Unlike VC-backed companies burning cash for market share, they need sustainable unit economics to stay profitable. This makes regional pricing hard to pull off.
I know I'm speaking form a position of privilege and this will be unpopular; but I'm not fond of subsidizing other users by paying premium prices for my subscriptions.
That's largely under Kagi's control though. They don't seem to be working hard to reduce their expensive dependencies, instead choosing to focus on a number of other features/products. Maybe that's the better business strategy overall but it does limit their appeal to many potential customers.
TBH, if i where them i'd be trying to serve open source models from my own infra, much cheaper to pay per GPU's per hour and batch process all your users prompts, than leave that big 95% fat margins to OpenAI and Anthropic
But I guess they have customers who want those APIs anyways, idk, again, i thought they where a search service, not an ai company, so this sub for llms business deal is weird from that POV? like great that it works for them to get money/customers but that doesnt seem their main point of existing?
Also with regional pricing one must ensure the lock out all those people who want the service cheaper than in their country and try using VPNs or other means. Otherwise you loose even more money.
Does not neccessarily have to be done that way. It could also work like you pay for Kagi in country X, and get it localized for that country, using that language and prioritizing sites in that country and so on
Not that this couldn't be changed to the detriment of the service, but just to note: it's currently a feature to localise your results to any region
As someone in the EU/Schengen, I need results for 3 languages or 4 regions (if "worldwide" counts as one region) on a weekly basis. If a Dutch payment method would mean getting only Dutch results, it would be about as valuable as a newspaper with all pages about trade and international affairs blacked out: you'd need to buy it for every region you're interested in which probably surpasses the original price
I agree with you. I understand it's incredibly challenging to implement regional pricing, especially if your company is based in a 1st world country, and dependencies are also priced for 1st world countries.
1) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to overlay real-world adds?
2) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to block AR adds?
> First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. "Kagi" isn't just Kagi Search, it's also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well.
> Like most search now Kagi has chosen to include Instant Answers that are AI generated, which means they're often wrong, as well as a "Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI bullshit.
I agree that Kagi should focus their efforts on delivering the best possible search experience (the image search is horrendously slow at times). But as for the above-mentioned AI tools, I love and use daily. For a short question style query, most of the time, the quick answer is all I need. Universal Summarizer is excellent at summarizing the uncountable YouTube videos that my friends send to me.
> At one point someone suggested the idea that searching for suicide-related terms should bring up a helpline, and he rejected that idea because it would be "biased" (I guess towards not wanting people to kill themselves).
Why is the so hard to accept for some people that not everything should push a message? If I want to know about a controversial topic, I need results about it, not a lecture. Their responsibility is to serve me good results.
Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the homo economicus, that's for sure.
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