So it looks like they will be collecting PII (user_ipaddress) and they will also link these events to an account (account_uuid) and you just have to trust their "de-identification pipeline".
Will be interesting to see if they roll this out in the EU (especially with the "Share analytics" box being checked by default).
I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law).
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
I very strongly feel like this really should be opt-in instead of opt-out. They seem to want to do things the right way, but having opt-out telemetry in a password manager is something I really do not want.
And since Bing rasing prices affects their price so much, I'd argue that Kagi isn't investing enough into their own crawler/index, so that they can ultimately bring down the price of search.
Instead they're integrating yet another third-party (OpenAI), thereby rasing the price even more and tying their price to third-party API pricing even more.
They have updated the FAQ section of the announcement to directly address this (very, very valid) point:
> Q. Didn’t you say in September that current subscibers will be grandfathered in?
> A. Yes we did say that in September. We are sorry that we have to walk back on that promise and we should have done a better job at communicating the pricing change debate that has been going on for over three months with our community.
> A lot of things changed in the meantime that we could not anticipate and predict, namely increase in search costs and popularization of generative AI which further increases the cost and making us lose even more money per user than before. That is not sustainable for a bootstrapped startup and we had to make the next best decision.
> The decisions made (the price change and cancellation of grandfathering) is exactly the necessary step to keep us in the business of search, aligning incentives between us and users, and keeping the best interest of our users in mind.
> We did the best we can, and we will still going to grandfather in everyone for up to a year on the old plan, and then on a special plan after that indefinitely (which still loses us money, just less). Discussion about this was long and hard and we made the best possible decision given our abilities and the circumstances.
This is so incredibly disappointing and basically confirms that we're (at least in part) paying for their AI experiments - something that I personally am not at all interested in.
> If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it.
My guess is that they will focus on the "subscription _price_" wording. Technically the price didn't change, since you can still pay them $10. They "just" changed the terms.
I'm a happy Kagi customer, but going from $10/mo to $25/mo seems like a very steep increase. (I realize that much of it is probably driven by Bing more than doubling the price for their API results.)
One thing that feels kind of disingenuous to me is the number of searches that "a normal user" does in a month. The blog post mentions it several times, but they always reference numbers provided by Google or DDG.
I have a feeling that the numbers for their "tech-savvy and heavy users of search" are _way_ higher than the averages of Google and DDG.
At my current usage, I would have to go with the $25/mo plan once my current subscription is up.
Will be interesting to see if they roll this out in the EU (especially with the "Share analytics" box being checked by default).