Pay per use is a great model for search and I wish we could use it. But I don”t think the world is ready yet.
In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price.
Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise.
We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)
Maybe you could do something similar to Google Fi's pricing model for data usage. You pick a monthly amount of data, say 2GB, for a monthly price of $40. Any GB you use in excess of that is $10 per GB up to a maximum of $80, and data usage is unlimited after that.
I would bet that my usage most months would not exceed $5, and I think many other prospective users would be willing to gamble on that as well. Food for thought.
In our survey 90% of users told us they preffered fixed fee over pay per use and feedback we got was that pay per use would make them anxious to use search. Also it adds additional friction in the signup flow (where the idea of paid search is already a novelty and then pay per search?) and so we decided to go with a fixed monthly price.
Sweet spot would be $15-$20/month but this way we would not have enough users, and less users equals leas feedback to build product. Our pricing is subject to a change, we had to launch with a price and we’ve chosen one that was good compromise.
We are likely to introduce pay per use first in our enterprise plan. Pricing Kagi is an extremely difficult intelectual challenege. (Kagi founder here)