Our bare cost of serving search comes to ~$0.0125 USD per query for APIs and infrastructure, not including salaries and other operating costs. In other words it costs us around $12.50 USD to process 1,000 queries. We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month.
Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs.
That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).
I’d love to see more updated numbers since it seems to have become slightly more popular since last year but I can’t imagine them doing better than continuing to nearly break even.
Interesting, it looks like they’re only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they’ll be able to drop prices.
I wish they’d combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I’d already be a customer. But it’s just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I’d seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn’t attractive at current prices.
I’ll certainly check back once they’ve matured a bit, but I’m not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn’t ideal.
So Kagi has released some financial information last year: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials
I’d love to see more updated numbers since it seems to have become slightly more popular since last year but I can’t imagine them doing better than continuing to nearly break even.
Interesting, it looks like they’re only a little over a year old. Maybe in a couple years they’ll be able to drop prices.
I wish they’d combine their product with a VPN offering. If Mozilla integrated with their own VPN (i.e. VPN settings per container group), I’d already be a customer. But it’s just a co-branded VPN without anything special added on top. If Kagi offered a combined option of VPN + search with VPN integration in their browser, I’d seriously consider it. However, I use Linux and Android for my personal devices, so the only feature I can use from them is their search, and that just isn’t attractive at current prices.
I’ll certainly check back once they’ve matured a bit, but I’m not going to be an early adopter though. I sincerely hope they stabilize their financials though, since bleeding $100k/month for salaries isn’t ideal.