Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
At least make prices fucking progressive. If you’re under certain poverty threshold, you don’t pay anything. If you’re over that same threshold, you pay an amount equivalent to what you actually have, so if you’re barely over the threshold, then you pay drastically less than the ones that have the more money.
Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
At least make prices fucking progressive. If you’re under certain poverty threshold, you don’t pay anything. If you’re over that same threshold, you pay an amount equivalent to what you actually have, so if you’re barely over the threshold, then you pay drastically less than the ones that have the more money.