Can I get this on my Netflix, Disney+, whatever too pls?

Not anti Kagi, but..

Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.

If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!

Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.

"It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.

He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.

An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.

In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.

And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.

Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.

Looks like I am a kagi customer now.

What a bold and genius move.

A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of money is going to Russia.

No thank you.

Just raising my hand as another who would sign up, but for that whole Yandex thing.

Does it mean that if someone dies they won't need to cancel the service?

Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?

I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?

Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.

I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that would be added to my 100 free searches.

Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be warded off.

They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!

Good pricing approach that I think lots of companies should start adopting. But I just can't wrap my head around paying for my online searches. self hosting a free service like SearXNG will forever my go to option for privacy and security

Is there any concern that this results in a negative feedback loop of "oh, I better not use Kagi for this one random thing, it'll cost a whole month's subscription"?

Maybe a threshold of a dozen searches or so before the subscription fee kicks in.

They say billing cycle, but what if I'm on the annual plan? Is my cycle a year? Or does my renewal date get pushed back a month if I don't use it?

I use kagi hundreds of times a day, so it's not something likely to happen soon, but I'm still curious

Wow, awesome. If everybody did this I could stop charging my credit card number every 6 months.

tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.

Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and email on top of your search

Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly and to be commended.

A good chunk of inflation is just price gouging, in today's modern world.

There are more tools to understand data and squeeze every penny from customers.

It's admirable when a company isn't trying to bleed customers dry.

I don't understand people who would use kagi (or any search engine) sparringly. If you're already willing to shell out money for a replacement, why wouldn't you use it all the time?

I trialed Kagi.

I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to Google without being tracked.

I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use Tor.

Every service provider should be obligated to do this. I'd bet there are tons of phone or Internet plans that have 0 usage

this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?

It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to make the service more accessible for developing countries.

Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?

Search = advertisements

A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute even more free translations.

Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to lose some of your goodwill.

Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.

I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever had with a search engine.

Someone please convince me to use Kagi. What makes it superior to Google for you?

It’s nice that they are in a position that they can do this. I use Kagi every day.

Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are billed these days.

What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused credit ?

if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

It’s great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.

The first time I encountered this was with Slack—they only charge for active users.

We follow a similar approach with our products : 1) PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium

Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they’ll request for hourly fair pricing - don’t charge me for those hours that i don’t use your service!

Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.

Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.

This is cool.

It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)

Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.

An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.

This actually makes me a lot more likely to sign up for Kagi! I've been hearing good things about it so I've been interested, but these days I'm very subscription-averse because there's just so dang many of them. But only paying for it if I actually use it makes signing up lower risk. (I know myself well enough to know that there's a good chance I forget to cancel otherwise.)

Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...

I think it’s a good balance between locking the user into your product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving service.

This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.

I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.

I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.

Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.

A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.

Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?

Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such thing but without AI stuff?

I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay only for what you use.

It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)

Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.

> Introducing Fair Pricing

This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.

This feels like an example of a company trying to do the "right thing" and deciding there must be a way to monetize that, regarding what everyone (even the web) is telling them.

Imagine the balance of revenue from non-returning users (think fitness) vs very heavy users, and finding a way to keep both parties happy. And the implications it has (those "paused" users still count towards "onboarded" users).

Major props Kagi team, or who-ever pushed this idea!

Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.

That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.

Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.

This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.

I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.

I would have purchased several services over the years if they had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they did not). In particular there was some video editing software for $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my craw the months I didn't use it.

Still no revision of the Yandex partenership. Spending money on Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist state.

Google too.

Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China

You might find Privacy Pass of interest then - https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

It should be out in the next day or so.

I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!

As I understand it, they aggregate and re-rank results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Brave, (more?), plus their own index.

I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.

I hear torrent protocol scales rather well.

Plugins will never match the possibilities of a deep integration. Those who build or fork VS code want the monthly fee because they make way more per customer

I don't doubt you but this life experience is so far from my own I struggle to understand what you use that much search volume for. I maybe search for 4-5 things a day (based on my one stint paying for Kagi and their usage reporting and trying to use it everywhere, and this was before AI products were able to search on your behalf) which is what led me to cancel, I was usually not getting the paid plan value from it. A large amount of my searches today are often just fancy autocompletes for specific URLS on already known domains that I probably could have accessed without a search engine at all.

I think the real value is a combination.

Use LLM to sift through search results (including all the crap clickbait) and find the thing you're really looking for.

A bit like perplexity does though I run it locally with OpenWebUI and SearXNG.

Do you pay for ChatGPT with built in web search? I’ve been paying for ChatGPT for two years. I just started using the ChatGPT extension for Chrome for search and it is so much better than Chrome.

they can try a shadow profile but at least it's not tied to me;)

> Their entire business model is to know who you are.

this is literally the opposite of reality

OK you got me, gptel supports it, so I signed up :P Search result quality is awesome so far, gonna play around with their LLM stuff.

10 free searches a month would work well for me, I think. A small free tier might be enough to get me to pay for Kagi. Currently I'm just not sure I'm missing anything and I don't have a way to test that, last I checked.

I pay $0.01 per MB on my phone data plan until I reach the unlimited plan value, then everything is free

I don't think you can guarantee that the price will go up. If I look at the API costs today, they do not have a sliding scale

How are you going to do that math? I'd say it's at least twice or three times as effective as any free option. So at $10 it's an absolute bargain. But hackers will say that $10 is an infinite multiplier of zero, so you should always be "rational" and use the free service.

I'm not at the stage in my life where I don't have to count pennies for my food budget, and neither do most people. You're also comparing supermarket food with a vacuum of a person who is about to starve to death. I mean in real life, assuming you're not suffering from atrophy, what can you buy in the super market that brings the same value? This is of course assuming that you have an interest in better search quality – which not everybody has.

You could also argue that a wooden log is worth more than $10, because you can keep yourself from freezing to death by burning it. Then the value is infinite.

Really. In the case of Google it’s even deeper for me. For some reason the ruination of their search engine feels like a betrayal for which Kagi’s proliferation feels like justice.

I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.

I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand.

If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.

It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.

The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.

I just mean that I've got a lot of subscriptions, and it would be psychologically easier to justify a $5/mo subscription over $10/mo for search.

Not having to think when I search is the selling point.

Kagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round

Disclosure: I work at Kagi

Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?

> Mostly DDG

Why do you trust what DDG says but not Kagi?

> require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world

https://kagi.com/pricing

There is a free tier (no card required) and the billing is done per search. It’s that simple.

Similar stats for me. It’s become an invaluable tool, sometimes I’ll use another browser that’s has Google as default and immediately notice how much worse it is — all the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better… with the benefit of more personalization

I do this when we have visiting relatives who would spend all day watching a particular cable news channel that gets them all riled up. Before they arrive, I subscribe to a different streaming service with a package that doesn’t include that channel and put its icon front and center on our TV. I then immediately cancel it so it doesn’t renew.

Totally worth the $20 or whatever.

I do something similar and that's why I usually try to subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes it costs a little more because the services have to pay Apple, but for me, it's worth it.

Please tell me that you have at least a Bash script or Selenium workflow for this. It actually sounds like a fun project to abstract and make pluggable. It would probably require maintenance, though.

There are also browser extensions like uBlacklist that can be used to do this on Google search results.

I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a little bit like how insurance is priced.

I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.

If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.

This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a backup (there are a handful of large websites that only allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular), but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest, and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.

With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.

When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.

When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.

In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.

[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes

Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :)

I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).

I'd rather have no results than spam results.

This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake.

I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.

I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.

The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.

Once you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask for a definition of ‘active’.

You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.

Safari has a set list of search engines, you cannot add to or remove from the list.

They currently "support" safari currently by redirecting the searches that go to your chosen search engine to kagi.com with an extension.

On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.

Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.

Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.

And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.

> Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.

I think that depends on your country. I’ve never had an issue cancelling my gym membership.

We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324

Also helps to scare with huge fines set up for the likes of Google and Facebook which any normal company can‘t pay in their wildest dreams.

> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now

Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.

[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...

Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments per article for news services being just around the corner. What ever happened to that?

Calling the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of hundreds of thousands people, targeting kindergartens, hospitals, normal civilians, destabilizing an entire continent --> "politics".

"any search source we consider using goes through rigorous evaluation process that considers: result quality, API availability, economic viability, result latency, legal terms, privacy terms, and technical feasibility. the moment 'politics' is a part of factors being considered for search results, is the moment I stop working on a search engine."

It is more insane to me that we need a law for this.

I've had places offer to just not bill for a few months while still allowing full access or offer some steep discounts in the workflow for cancelling in attempt to reduce churn.

Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.

I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and something that a challenger service could possibly use (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective, it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly outgoings.

It's a very slippery path towards per-watch pricing with "rent this episode for just $0.99"... and that will be horrible.

I straight up get better results than current Google.

you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.

I get better results.

I block the shit (a user preference with some good easy options), I up rank my favourites and pin Wikipedia.

I’m happily paying for a family plan.

Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search. Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.

"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.

You’re in Australia?

If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc

You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.

If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.

A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.

This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.

I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.

Yours truely, Mr Middle Age Curmudgeon

> they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease

They problem is the cancellation process, not "they shouldn't charge me if I'm not using it".

Also, in my experiences most of those services which offered free time or heavily discounted alternatives to cancelling tend to be things which have a pretty low cost per subscriber (e.g., news sites, simple applications, not much per-user storage).

Why would you, if you extensively tested the 2022 model and considered it garbage?

My favorite is that I've now had multiple services that don't warn you prior to renewing an annual subscription.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery subscription reminds you when there are about to charge you.

That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.

As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.

I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.

How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.

The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.

I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.

The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.

If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?

Yes, exactly. So those "huge fines" won't really scare a normal company since it would not apply to them

For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.

For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.

Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.

Streaming services mostly pay for licensed content up front. That’s why video streaming is much more like a traditional tech company - high up front costs with very low marginal costs compared to streaming music companies where their costs stream linearly with their revenues

Nothing in the comment you're responding to says anything about me using Google search or Gmail. In other comments I'm simple comparing the use case of using google search with an obfuscated connection and without ever signing into a google account with the use case of having to sign into Kagi. In that respect, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you're responding to another comment of mine please respond to that comment so I can better understand your point.

> The conversation about and innovation in the future of search right now is related to AI-assisted answers

I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.

But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.

Kinda sad to read this.

The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.

If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.

Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.

The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)

Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel, the prohibition on charging me for the months I didn't use it would've made this a non-issue. Hell, I'd probably still be a customer today, now that I've long ago moved back to a city with Anytime Fitness locations.

That's funny. I'm curious now, do you live in a microstate, or an island? Or was it a case of an overly eager delivery platform?

US law has the concept of "civil contempt" to address willful lawbreaking of this sort. At that point executives risk jail time.

Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.

Like chlamydia.

yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi. Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.

This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than the occasional service that has such obvious and widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I struggle to think of examples of those services, where neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including cancelling cards because it was easier).

By that argument the most customer-friendly action would be to force everyone in the world to subscribe to Netflix.

Are you hitting "New Identity" in the Tor browser, removing all cookies/sessions and creating a new circuit for each search?

In that case I guess there is not too much they can deduce aside from the type of device (desktop, mobile).

But of course, if you make more search queries without hitting "New Identity", they can piece together a lot more than that, including exactly who you are with enough time between new identities.

If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well. There is even a Hidden Service for it [1], so you don't even need to hit the clear web at any point.

If you're concerned about tying your credit card information to your searches, you can just use a prepaid debit card or crypto to pay [2].

[1]: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...

[2]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

I'm not sure you appreciate how small "billions of user records" is for Google.

>Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company whose core business product is tracking

I'm doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that a user still has tools in their disposal to prevent a company whose core business is tracking from tracking them as long as said company does not require the user to sign in with PII info.

When you sign in with Kagi, your only protection is to "trust them". Kagi's next move should be to allow mail-in-cash for account activation to back up their privacy intent if they require user sign-in, like some other privacy-focused services allow.