The archive · Business Models · Strategic decision · 2018–2025
Kagi sells search to users: no ads, no tracking, no data to sell
A subscription search engine: free accounts get 100 searches a month, paid plans start around $5, and 50,000 subscribers fund nearly a million daily searches.
Kagi Inc.
What it had to solve
Search engines have always been free because advertisers pay, and Kagi's founder Vladimir Prelovac built the counter-example: a search company whose only customer is the person typing the query. He self-funded it for five years before taking the first outside capital in 2023, keeping growth deliberate and the incentive structure clean.
How it works
Kagi is a subscription-only search engine: no ads, no tracking and no behavioural profile being sold. Founder Vladimir Prelovac started it in 2018 and funded it himself for five years with about three million dollars of his own money, opening the door to outside capital only in 2023. The core argument is that everyone already pays for search — the question is whether the currency is attention or a card.
The free tier gives 100 searches a month, then plans step from about $5 a month for 300 searches to $10 for unlimited use, with a higher early-features tier near $25 and family plans. Technically Kagi is a meta-search across several indexes plus its own crawler; commercially it is a business whose only customer is the person typing the query, and its Public Benefit Corporation charter commits it to a more human-centric web.
Kagi's pricing page puts a number on the alternative: Google took about $277 per US user a year — $23 a month — from influencing search results, and its founders' 1998 paper warned that ad-funded engines would be biased toward advertisers. By mid-2025 Kagi had about 50,000 subscribers processing close to a million searches a day, roughly $6 million of annual recurring revenue at the average plan.
Why it lands
- Charging the searcher removes the conflict at the heart of ad-funded search: the customer is the user, so ranking paid results would betray the only person who pays.
- Bootstrapping plus small rounds from user-investors (42 in 2023, most of them customers) removed the pressure to grow into a venture-scale outcome the way Neeva had to.
- A free tier of 100 searches makes the switch cheap to try, and the subscription bundles search with an assistant, a browser and a news reader, widening the product against churn.
- Fifty thousand subscribers at about $10 a month is enough revenue to run a small team — proof that a paid search business can be sustainable without Google-scale distribution.
What it did
By mid-2025 Kagi counted about 50,000 subscribers processing close to a million searches a day — roughly $6 million of annual recurring revenue at the average plan — after raising $670,000 from 42 user-investors in 2023 and converting to a Public Benefit Corporation. Rory Sutherland and Stephen Wolfram sit on its advisory board.
What you can take
Do not out-feature the incumbent — out-align with them: when the payer is the user rather than the advertiser, every product decision has the same customer, and people will pay for that alignment.
Since then
Kagi's stated ambition in 2025 was one million paying users within three years, and its conversion to a Public Benefit Corporation made the customer-first charter legally binding. The comparison the industry watches is Neeva, which ran the same thesis from 2019 but shut its consumer product in June 2023; Kagi's bootstrapped, user-funded structure is the difference cited for why it has survived. As subscription-first answer engines multiplied, Kagi remained the longest-running evidence that a search product can live on payments alone.
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