When I wrote a profile piece about Kagi last February, the service boasted 38,000 paying subscribers. Today, according to Kagi’s public stats page, its subscriber base has nearly doubled — to 72,847 users, as of this writing.
It may still be a drop in the bucket — and it may always be a niche demand, in the grand scheme of the global tech picture — but it represents a rapidly growing demand. And Kagi isn’t the only player seeing both the demand and the resulting opportunity. Practically every time Google pushes AI further into its search setup, the privacy-focused (and AI-optional) search provider DuckDuckGo reports a surge in its adoption as well.
And search isn’t the only arena where this same sentiment is starting to boil over. I hear constantly from folks who are growing ever-more frustrated with all the unavoidable AI integration in other productivity tools, ranging from email to notes and even just plain ol’ document writing. Heck, I created my own custom interface for Google Docs on the desktop (with the help of Gemini, in another delightfully ironically twist) just to escape from all the over-the-top noise Google keeps adding into that environment. It’s a nerdy hack, to be sure — and it’s an opportunity for someone crafty to come in and create an actual solution, in the style of what Kagi has done with search, to more effectively address that same underlying desire.
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