There are certain things that Kagi gets very right. Having the ability to (de)prioritize websites, or to right-click to save images, or to automatically rewrite website URLs…
Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.
One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.
Of course! It just saddens me to know that users who are incessantly bombarded with ads, or who fall prey to invasive tracking, or who believe in AI hallucinations… probably won’t have access to a better search experience.
I know what you mean, but find myself (a Kagi subscriber since right after the started) wondering if the partial defeat of invasive tracking and ads will (inadvertantly) improve search experiences even for non paying searchers, as in monetization will be pushed to some other corner of online experiences.
Comparing adblocked and de-AI'd Google to Kagi in 2025 is like comparing Yahoo and some Greasemonkey improvements to prime Google around ~2008.
I get it won't ever become as big as Google if everyone has to pay buy I don't think everyone has to become that big anyways. I'd rather have multiple search engines with varying strengths and weaknesses than another monopoly surrounded by smaller companies keeping Microsoft Bing on life support.
I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines.
There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it.
The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if your use case is just replacing Google.
Kagi is still a good solution for other use cases. For the privacy-oriented you have Privacy Pass, for the familymen you get very good parental control options, for college and gradschool you get the Academic Lens and the very underrated feature of "lensing" the AI assistant.
The Translator outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in my experience, too, and provides very nice context and such for translations. Kagi Maps might become the premiere OpenStreetMap interface, too, with amazing integration of other resources. Just one anecdote about it: I just checked in Kagi Maps a local restaurant I added a few weeks ago in OpenStreetMap, and on Kagi they somehow have some interior photos that circulated in a local magazine. Amazing stuff
>Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
Damn, you just gave me a faint glimmer of hope for a search renaissance somewhere down the line, when it becomes so niche that it won't even be worth it to SEO-spam.
Did they expand the personalized site list? 100 Places is not enough. Honestly, I don't know what number would be enough, because some specific SEO sites make it to my results.
Still, I think paying for search remains a taboo and this is unlikely to change in the near future. So Kagi seems poised to remain a service for the tech-literate — which is precisely the kind of audience that already knows how to use ad-blocking, avoid Google’s AI snippets and so forth.