I'm completely on the opposite camp, the quality of life I get from using Kagi instead of Google is definitely worth $120 to me. I spend more on some video streaming service and that's purely for entertainment, a search engine is my portal to finding information on the web, that's much more valuable than watching some films and series.

I regularly compare results for the same query between Kagi and Google just to check if still makes sense, 18 months in and every single time I do this comparison I feel more validated to pay for it.

Of course, totally personal experience but I've got so used to the quality of results from Kagi that Google has become almost unusable in comparison.

I'm in the same camp since I subscribed. I became a 10x developer because my search results are way more accurate and I don't waste time anymore when filtering spam. I would estimate that I used to waste 1 hour per day while looking for what I wanted. It's not a cheap tool, but $10 for gaining 20 hours a month is something that I can live with.

An AI equivalent would be the JetBrains AI for the same price which seems to be integrated to CLion but I'm still not completely sold about it.

What field are you in, or what type of searching do you regularly do?

I’m also curious about the LLM integration with Kagi. I currently pay for a Claude subscription but would be happy to drop that and pick up the $25/mo Kagi if LLM access was similar. Is there a dedicated chat app? Interface?

They have a dedicated chat interface at https://kagi.com/assistant You can access this from any search bar by adding !expert to your query. That’s the general case… there’s also !code for development questions and you can create your own more focused flavors.

You can provide custom instructions and set up multiple assistant flavors. For example, you can have one that highlights controversial information about a topic, another one that jokes about everything, etc.

All the assistants have optional web access. They use Kagi search to look up relevant information for you. You can apply a search lens to restrict web results to particular domains.

You can set the assistant to use different LLM APIs. They currently support Anthropic (Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus), OpenAI (GPT 4o, GPT 4 mini), Google (Gemini Pro), Mistral (Pixtral, Large) and Meta (Llama 3.1 405B).

Kagi maintains their own LLM benchmark. Their goal is to (1) ensure that models haven’t ever seen the questions before and (2) emphasize reasoning and instruction following, which they’ve found to be most important for the assistant. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html

Once you've set up the plugins and private browsing API keys there's no more friction is there? I found the iOS Safari extension buggy for a bit, but I haven't had any issues for quite a while now. The price does make me wince once in a while though. What are you using instead?

I'm happy with the price but Firefox randomly logs me out in private mode (maybe after an update? too infrequent to be able to spot the pattern, but it's there), which is a bit annoying.

Funny - I'm using Firefox too and haven't had that issue for quite a while now. I don't search in private mode all that much though.

I do almost all browsing (except for services where I need to be logged in) from private mode. For the ones where the app needs to know me, I have separate profiles (multi-account containers ftw!).

Nothing especially sensitive, I just consider it basic online hygiene.

That's what I dealt with. It seemed like roughly 50% of the time I'd have to re-auth for private browsing searches. Across multiple devices this becomes even more of a pain in the ass.

Can you not just use the URL with the token that signs you in automatically?

For some reason you can't just add a custom search engine url to Firefox, you need to have an extension. Kagi has one that swts up the engine and injects the token, but it sometimes breaks so I need to uninstall/install it.

Really a minor annoyance tho.

Oh wow, I forgot about that. I tend to add a bookmark and then make that a search engine, but yeah, that will require you to type the bookmark's character every time. Annoying that you can just add your own engine URL.

There is this firefox extension I have used before: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-custom-se.... It lets you configure a custom search engine, so you could add the Kagi token url to it, and have a logged in search engine in both regular and private browsing. Unlike the kagi extension, I haven't had issues needing to reauth when using it.

I found that access to the LLMs alone make it worthwhile, even if you completely ignored search. Access to all commercial LLMs for barely above the price of a single one.