why do you care about these things exactly? Please explain a bit more. You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts? That's not exactly like "I like the company products but I don't agree with them signing up for military contracts". It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on?
On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there. I'm pretty pleased with their AI implementation. In search it only activates if you append a question mark. Their assistant is a pretty good alternative chat interface, it lets you choose the model. I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models. It has probably fallen behind the tooling others have at this point though.
> You like the service but don't agree with the company spending money on... t-shirts [...] It smells a bit like you want to control what they spend on?
i like the service, but spending money on t-shirts seems unreasonable to me. I'm sure there are a dozen things which would benefit from the money and time which were spent on manufacturing clothes. From their own blog post [1]:
> The process from here involves setting up a business entity in Germany, so we can import the t-shirts, store them in a warehouse, connect inventory logistics and ship them all over the world. This includes building a website and connecting it to a back-end database
which sounds to me like not the best way to spend the company's time
also:
> why did we go through all this trouble and allocate nearly a third of our investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts
all their answers to that question they asked themselves in the same blog post seem silly to me. Go give bonuses to your employees, upgrade devices, make a company event, etc
> On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there
absolutely not! If i want an AI search result, i go to an AI provider of choice. Again, i don't think that should be their focus
> I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models
replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me — i cancelled Kagi subscription because i use claude as a search engine
I still don't understand about the t-shirt thing. Companies spend their money on all kinds of things that are apart from their core offering. Like lavish office buildings, on-sites, big paychecks for executives, charity donations. I don't think I could buy anything from anyone if I needed to go line by line through their accounts to make sure I approved of everything.
> replace chatgpt with claude and reverse the statement and it will be true for me
... like, ok. But now I'm confused. You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. With kagi I can use chatgpt, claude, others. But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is.
Kagi is not for you - fine, I'd have no problem with that. But the way you've written your comments is that you do like the service but you didn't like what the company did in other ways... not a moral objection but that it wasn't, in your view, an efficient use of their time. And I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant which is why I've asked questions about it.
> Companies spend their money on all kinds of things that are apart from their core offering [...] I don't think I could buy anything from anyone if I needed to go line by line through their accounts to make sure I approved of everything
you are dead right, but spending nearly a third of the total revenue sounds like a waste for me. They aren’t an established company, they are still very small in terms of users. I would be way happier seeing them re-investing in growth. If they would signal somewhere at any point they want to keep being small, i would totally get their move with the t-shirts. Since they haven’t mentioned it even once to my best knowledge, i assume they are taking the traditional path which is growth
> You didn't want them doing AI but you're not opposed to it. [...] But you don't need to pay for the level that includes that so once again I'm puzzled as to what your point is
i pay for the pro version which has CLI support, it’s crucial for me and lets me to almost never leave my natural habitat, terminal. Also it has bigger context windows, bigger token limits, better everything, which i don’t believe i can achieve with Kagi’s subscription. I’m strong proponent of the Unix philosophy: each thing should do only one thing and do it well. To me AI, just like t-shirts, is an unaffordable luxury which a company like Kagi at the moment absolutely shouldn’t even look at. You may argue that in the modern world AI seems like a next logical evolutional step of search engines — but to me is trying to be a jack of all trades, master of few. I paid for the product for 2 years, i expected different things. Give me bigger limits of include/exclude website lists in lenses, maintain your own blacklist of garbage websites like pinterest (you can even use AI for this), create a public collection of easily discoverable lenses, give better local searches like the ones google provide. I didn’t get any of that, and then i received an email about my t-shirt being ready to be shipped — and shipping wasn’t free by the way, which was confusing to me personally after so much noise about free t-shirts. That subtle detail, still paid shipping, was another putting off factor, which seemed like a dark marketing pattern
> I'm absolutely sure this isn't what you meant
sorry, i didn’t get that, can you please explain what you are sure about that i didn’t mean something?
On AI - I think they have no choice tbh, they need to bring something to the table there. I'm pretty pleased with their AI implementation. In search it only activates if you append a question mark. Their assistant is a pretty good alternative chat interface, it lets you choose the model. I cancelled my chatgpt sub because I can use kagi for many models. It has probably fallen behind the tooling others have at this point though.