Kagi is a subscription-based search engine that argues that paying for search is a reasonable thing to do in order to avoid ads and companies selling your information. They also have lenses, e.g. for searching the fediverse specifically. Anyone that wants to share their experience of using Kagi?
I realize that this post sounds like I’m shilling for Kagi, so I’ll say up front that I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. I’m just a satisfied customer. I’ll also fully admit that I don’t know much about the controversies or privacy issues other people are referencing. So look at others’ replies for that. I’ll be doing my research about it too.
From a purely search perspective, I don’t really use their customizations. I don’t need to. It far and away beats any competition in my experience. I’ve used it for over a year now, and will probably never switch off of it. Every month or two, when I have to use a different browser or machine that has DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Brave, I get frustrated within a few minutes of searching. Maybe some self-hosted stuff can compete, but I haven’t tried any of them for any length of time. Of the handful of people I’ve recommended it to IRL, they all switched over permanently.
But general praise isn’t worth anything without an explanation, so here is a long-winded one.
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Lenses are awesome! Of the ones I use the most:
- Forums is a much better version of appending “reddit” to a search.
- PDFs comes in handy for me specifically. I read a lot of papers, and it is very good at skipping past annoying sign in, click through four buttons, and go through a captcha to get to the pdf.
- Academic is a good supplement to Google Scholar. I still use scholar as my main search for academic sources since I don’t want to miss any papers that other people will find. But Kagi often finds some relevant papers that don’t appear high up Google Scholar.
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The amount of AI slop, SEO-optimized articles on other search engines is just abhorrent. I’m not sure how they do it, but Kagi does an amazing job at cutting them out. I no longer fear searching for “best vacuums for hard floors” or whatever. The results that come up are actual good review sites (Consumer Reports, Rtings.com, specific websites dedicated to vacuum reviews) and sometimes useful Reddit posts. On other search engines (at least back when I switched to Kagi), I only got AI generated listicles of what are the first 10 results on Amazon with “reviews” that are just rewordings of the amazon descriptions.
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I know AI in search is controversial, but I think the “Quick Answer” feature is done very tastefully. I do think there are searches where AI summaries can be helpful, efficient, and unlikely to be inaccurate. The button doesn’t feel intrusive, and I’ll end up clicking it about 1/10 searches.
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I like the little shield on the right side that gives you an insight into how many ads/trackers a site has. It’s another thing that can help you make better choices on which websites to go to. Not a huge thing, but I like it.
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I’ll admit this one is less precise, but I feel like search results are much closer to what I’m actually looking for. When I’m searching for something very specific, the results are exactly what I want, not tangential.
Summary: For my personal day-to-day searches, Kagi is a no-brainer. It make searching easy and frictionless again. It’s what I’d expect a good search engine to be like in 2026. And I think it’s worth paying for a service when it provides value, especially when you aren’t the product.
This pretty much sums up my experience as well.
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I have it, I use it, I like it. I love not seeing ads, I love getting more independent results like blogs, I love getting tailored websites based on my own design (meaning i personally flagged things for more or less weight in the Algo).
I’m aware they’re not as privacy focused as they claim to me. I’m aware the founder is a bit weird and that they have some AI components. Right now id rather pay them $100 bucks a year than give that same amount to Google via ads, and most importantly protecting my information sphere.
If there was a better paid option I’d consider switching. I’m not convinced SearX or whatever it is is worth the effort, so Kagi I remain.
+1 to everything this guy said for me as well.
I’ll add that I think the price is probably too high for what I use, but it’s still worth it to not use Google.
this is my exact experience / opinion. i’ve tried many other search options (ddg, ecosia, startpage, yandex, &utm=14, my own searX instance) and none of them gave me the same user experience as kagi.
try out the lowest tier like i did and see how those first few hundred searches work out for you, if you’re in doubt.
Does it have decent reverse image search? Nothing I’ve tried is as good as Google reverse image search used to be.
I have subscribed for two separate months before, when doing a project that involved a lot of research.
I always cancelled after the project was done, because of their stance on privacy. They clearly pretend to be privacy focused, but you need to provide an email and their privacy policy didnt even meet the legal bare minimum in the EU up until a month or so ago, which is just embarasing. Yes, they have that privacy pass thing, but then it blocks like half the features that make kagi good so I didnt use it much.
It’ll be tough for you to find a middle of the road review of this, because people either pay a monthly subscription fee, and are aware of this, and use it because otherwise they’d be wasting their money… or they don’t use, it and can’t really contribute.
Personally, I’ve been turned off by it for a couple reasons:
- I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble
And when you ask your own AI a question like “does God exist?” it will answer it relying on biases you preconfigured. When you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it will do so knowing what kind of food you like to eat. The same will happen when you ask it to recommend a good coffee maker - it will know the brands you like, your likely budget and the kind of coffee you usually drink. All this information will be volunteered to the AI by you…
- The face of the company is rather weird
- Subscription money goes to AI
- It doesn’t offer me sufficient value compared to free search engines that keep me anonymous by default.
ETA: If you use Kagi, don’t rely on promises alone to keep your data private. Consider a masked email for login (you must provide one), and definitely use their Privacy Pass to keep your searches unlinked from your account instead.
This is very similar to my experience.
I was a Kagi user for around 3 years, didn’t really ran into issues looking up stuff, but also never really had to compare it with other search engines. I found answers to what I needed, and it was a passable answer. Don’t need much else from a search engine.
I left when they started investing my money into muddying search with AI. Yes, you can turn it off. But that still means I get way less worth for what I pay, because instead of focusing the respurces on making a better search engine, they are focusing on AI.
I found out I’m ok with just using DDG or recently Ecosia. Both have AI, I can turn it off, but at least I’m not paying for it so IDC. In the case of Ecosia, at least they have a greenwashing twist as a bonus so I can feel better about myself, lol.
EDIT: Just to make it clear, I kind of trust Ecosia in their mission and I respect what their goal is, but I’m having a hard time trusting a company that adds an OpenAI-based chatbot to their site. They might’ve already changed it, but when they rolled it out and I saw the sentence “Ask our Ecosiabot about how to be more enviromental friendly” literally right under “This chat is subjected to OpenAI privacy policy” is so extremely ironic I lost a lot of trust in them. But still, at least they are trying to greenwash a bit.
Thanks for reminding me about Ecosia. I hadn’t seen any of this, so I looked at their privacy policy and they actually refer to Mistral as if it is their exclusive provider:
LLM provider
We offer an AI-based chat service that allows you to have back and forth conversations on topics of your choice. If you use our chat service, queries will be sent to our model provider Mistral AI.
But then, much farther down, they mention OpenAI.
The provider we primarily use is Mistral AI… Ecosia may engage OpenAI as a backup service provider where Mistral is unavailable or a fallback is necessary to ensure continuity… You can find more information in OpenAI’s privacy policy. OpenAI will store your input and output data for 30 days for quality assurance purposes.
My issue is mostly with their claim “we want and have the service we provide energy neutral”, vs " oh and we also use AI from companies that are using the power equivalent of a large city to power them".
Any enviromentaly conscious person should be against AI.
Yeah, found out that the company and its founder sounds a bit… interesting to say the least. Thanks for your input
That blog post was an interesting read. I didn’t really like that kagi doesn’t a offer a plan without any LLM but the handling of user data seems even worse.
Wow I did not expect to enjoy reading that blog post as much as I did. This Vlad dude comes off like a petulant child.
- I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble
I don’t know why Kagi would be shilled in the Privacy community when they don’t seem to actually understand privacy… They claim to be privacy focused out of one side of their mouth, while asking for more and more information from the user to allow their AI features to work out of the other side. They apparently resolve this in their own head by just claiming that any information you voluntarily give to them isn’t private information.
Yup, and it has been great. In terms of time saved and general result quality for what I do, it’s worth it to me.
Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven’t seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:
– you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well
– the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They’ve kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They’ve said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.
– Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate
– Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps
– I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls
– I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free
– they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I’ve read its a legit implementation)
In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.
Great write-up.
Despite my concerns, if I could purchase a subscription that was free of AI investment, I think I might.
Despite how pro-AI their ownership is, imo they have the least intrusive AI options of any search I’ve used, free or not
Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.
Is kagi maps and translate included in the subscription? Any other services? This is the first I’ve heard of it
Maps is just a web app at the moment but there are apps for iOS and Android supposedly in the works: https://kagi.com/maps/
Kagi Translate is a web app and has apps available. You can do quick translations for free but the better models and features like document translation are behind the paywall: https://translate.kagi.com/
As for other features theres a list in the user guide. Mainly search, summarize, news, translate, maps and assistant. All in various stages of development, you can read more here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/
heard many replies mention the CEO’s questionable behavior. I have not heard of any. Anyone have links? Also let’s not just disregard shitty / questionable behavior and really lean into it - because it won’t go away. We’d just pump cash into someone who then learns being questionable or shitty is ok.
They give you a free trial (no CC required) so just give it a try for yourself.
Its the least bad option. AFAIK no one else even offers paid search, much less ones that allow you to block sources, or limit your search to “the small web”.
No, there’s other paid search engines, the others just look like they are from the pre-iPod era and have suboptimal spiders
I currently have the trial and I use it when other search engines like DDG fail me. It has helped me find documented solutions to tech problems at work that came up empty from other sources. I feel like the search results are more similar in quality to what google used to be in the early days of the internet, maybe even at the height of their dont be evil days. Which is really good praise
I am on the fence about subscribing, because although they claim privacy the fact that my searches are tied to my account in some form is an issue, even if there doesnt appear to be search history. Also the value of search really has been pushed so far down by other options that the cost is extremely hard to justify for me
I pay for it, like $100 or so a year. I don’t use any of the AI features, just the search. The search results are great, better than Google. I’m happy with it.
that’s a lot of money tbh
Yeah, but I heard that is way less than google makes from personal information, per person per year.
Possibly, I don’t mean it in a way of " you’re stupid for paying"-way, its just too much money for most people
Oh no, I am not disagreeing with you. I was perfectly happy with startpage and ddg, until I have less time to scroll over ad and a bit more money to spend.
I just want to put the price into perspective. I agree that people should be financially responsible and use the free solution when they don’t have the cash.
That being said, some people around me have an openAI/claude subscription that is way more expensive. And that makes me feel slightly better about where my money is going to.
I agree
Why not just use this and it is free https://github.com/searxng/searxng
I have used both for over a year and personally dont find searx to be remotely close to being as good as Kagi… The search results are not accurate, at least not for me who search in multiple languages, and ive tried really really tried to customize searx to work for me. Kagi also feels faster and has a good looking UI.
“Avoid companies selling you infotmation…”
Ironically Kagi sells you information, just that the info is free of ads.
I begrudgingly think it is worth it, though mainly for the purposes of better search results. You can up/down rank, and even block websites. The amount of time you save not having to trudge through enshittified results is amazing, and sadly (imo) justifies the $10/month for no Pinterest, medium, quora.
The value proposition from a privacy and moral perspective is more questionable however. Though it does offer more privacy conscious options than other search engines (not saying much), the defaults are definitely not very privacy respecting.
I know that LLMs are generally antithetical to privacy, but Kagi’s LLM offerings are usually vetted for things such as zero data retention. IIRC their LLM queries actually cost more than their search queries, so it’s somewhat of a loss leader.
Kagi as a company also just seems… immature? Most of their customer/community engagement is via a Discord server, and with an ever increasing amount of half-baked features no one asked for (browser, translate, and even email), combined with their CEO’s questionable behaviour, does not inspire much confidence.
On the other hand, their search is still the best, and they have other features such as SlopStop (like sponsor block but for flagging AI slop results), and dedicated small web index are genuinely amazing.
I am. Loving it.
same!
