At Kagi, our mission is simple: to humanise the web. We want to deliver a search experience that prioritises human needs, allowing you to explore the web effectively, privately, and without manipulation. We evaluate new technologies not for their acclaim but for their true potential to support our mission.
Since its launch, Kagi Assistant has been a favorite for many users as it allows access to world top large language models, grounded in Kagi Search, all in one place in one beautiful user interface – and all that for +$15/mo upgrade from our Professional plan that provides unlimited Kagi Search.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Kagi Assistant is now available to all users across all plans, expanding from its previous exclusivity to Ultimate subscribers, as an added value to all Kagi customers, without increasing the price.
An important note: We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for ‘Assistant for All’ is scheduled to be completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.
Our approach to integrating AI is shaped by these realities and guided by three principles:
- AI serves a defined, search-relevant context: Kagi Assistant is a research aid.
- AI enhances, it doesn’t replace: Kagi Search remains our core offering, functioning independently. Kagi Assistant is an optional tool you can use as needed.
- AI should enhance humanity, not diminish it: Our goal is to improve your research process by helping you synthesise information or explore topics grounded in Kagi Search results, not to replace your critical thinking.
Kagi Assistant embodies these principles, working within the context of Kagi’s search results to provide a new way to interact with information. It’s built to make research easier while respecting your privacy and AI’s limits.
By making Kagi Assistant available to everyone, we’re giving all users the choice to explore this capability as part of their Kagi toolkit – at no additional cost to their subscription. Use it when and how it suits your workflow, knowing it’s built with privacy, responsibility, and human-centric values at its core.
Let’s talk about the specifics!
AI grounded in Kagi search, guided by you
When you enable web access, the Assistant has access to Kagi Search results. It will also respect your personalised domain rankings and allows the use of Lenses to narrow search scope.
Or, if you’d prefer to discuss directly with the model, you can also turn off web access. It also supports file uploads, allowing you to provide additional context or information for
11 Comments
viraptor
If the staff sees this – please stop preventing zoom. Not only is that bad for accessibility, it makes the article less useful for everyone – there's a screenshot included showing off the feature, but it's too small to read on the phone and I can't zoom in.
blissofbeing
It would be nice if all models where available on every plan too.
C4stor
The "fair use" part takes a lot of place in this article.
It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what happens if you use less – for example maybe with a partial rebate on your next billing cycle ?
I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved", currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy, since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract.
I'd rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.
m1keil
Anyone used both Kagi assistant and perplexity and can share how was the experience?
colonial
> A note on our fair-use policy
> Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on your plan’s value.
Although I likely won't use Assistant, stuff like this is why I love Kagi. My relationship with them as a customer feels refreshingly transparent; I can't think of any other consumer SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does this make money?" question.
(Compare, say, Discord. It's best in class, but eternally unprofitable – which makes me wary that it might fold or go to hell at the drop of a hat.)
fhd2
I wonder why the rollout is specifically over the weekend. I'd personally do something like that Monday to Wednesday rather than Friday to Sunday. It seems like the kind of thing that needs monitoring and quick reactions – can easily get expensive if something goes wrong.
xigoi
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723964
maelito
Did Kagi change their mind on financing a russian asset, Yandex ?
I haven't seen any news about this.
greatgib
Obviously I'm happy to benefit from being able to use most model "for free" in my paid non ultimate account.
But I'm concerned that this will not rot the business model like that kind of thing happen for other services.
I would have preferred that the full of my subscription cost goes to the core feature of developing the search engine and directly the related feature. And as of today, I pay a separate premium if I'm interested by the AI assistant.
Now, with it being in all subscriptions, and knowing that anyway they can only work by paying the token price per request to all AI providers, it means less of my money going to the search index improvement, and what I'm more worried is that a forced increased of the subscription price in the coming years.
Something like, as you know, our costs are high, so we need to raise the pricing to stay sustainable.
Even if not the best reference, this remind me of Netflix saying look we are adding "videogames" (that no one wants) to your subscription for free, but now we will have to raise our prices, because you know, inflation and all of that
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TekMol
"Privacy by default"
I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite of privacy to me.
Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and try fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming from me.
qwertox
I was given a free month of Kagi to test, and it had so many rough edges that during the last days of of the trial I was already using Google again.
Notable issues for me:
– maps (from Mapbox) are really bad. Sluggish performance and lack of information
– barely any info boxes
– no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") fives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result
– no timezone calculations: "10 am PT" in Kagi: "= 10 Pt am (metric petaton attometers)" in Google: "10:00 Freitag Pacific Time (PT) entspricht 19:00 Freitag in …"
– no search history, which is sometimes really useful to have
Other than that, the search results are really good.