Kagi is good
Kagi is a great product and I’m happy to be a customer. If you are not familiar, it’s first-and-foremost a paid web search service, though they have expanded to offer a few other useful things.
I bought a year of Kagi’s ultimate plan back in February after kicking the tires with a trial of search. Having a trial quota made it tricky for me to use at first - when should I use one of my limited searches to get the best value out of it? Eventually I decided to just buy a month of unlimited searches and go whole-hog on it, replacing Bing as my daily driver on all devices. I was convinced to upgrade to a yearly plan within a week.
The general search is easily the best you can get as a consumer. I’ll echo what others have said: it feels like Google from years ago. Or maybe just what I nostalgically remember older internet…
On top of this, the AI assistant has been surprisingly useful. I use Claude most day-to-day, but for anything served by active internet research I find that it gives less than stellar results. I assume this is because Brave’s search (what I understand to be their web search backend) just isn’t as good. Kagi’s assistant UX lacks a bit of polish comparatively, which is why I’m hesitant to reach for it every time. I’m excited to try their native iOS assistant app when it becomes available. It will likely displace Claude from my Home Screen.
Kagi Translate was invaluable during my trip to Japan earlier this year. It blew Apple’s built-in translate app out of the water consistently. It was especially helpful in restaurants and bars where the menu text wasn’t always presented in a way that iOS Translate handles well.
Paying for web search feels stupid until you try it. It’s refreshing to deal with a tech company that has a straightforward business model that aligns their incentives to mine.