this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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It was okay while I was using it. Just a bit pricey. But I stopped using it when they started the whole "EUs GDPR doesn't apply to us" non-sense. Simply not a company I can trust to handle personal data properly.
I also liked the part where they decided they don't need to pay the VAT.
This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
As a paying member, I know that they started charging (and presumably transferring) VAT last year.
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
I looked it up and there appears to be an exception for such cases where VAT is charged in the company's jurisdiction rather that the customer's (it's usually the other way around) until you reach 10000€ annual turnover. Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.
How is this FUD when you just said they admitted to it?
Exemptions vary by country, but often they only apply to small businesses.
Often there's no right to any exemptions anyway if your company isn't headquartered in the country (and Kagi is from USA).
Either way you only have to pay VAT on transactions made after you go over the limit, while Kagi admitted they have to settle unpaid taxes.
This situation can only happen if they didn't pay the taxes they already legally owed.
See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3592-march-19th-2024-introducing-sales-taxes
They tried to make themselves look like the good guys, while in reality they just paid back their overdue taxes they were required to collect all this time.
Not knowing the tax rules is not an excuse.
If they wanna do business internationally they can afford to hire an accountant.
It's not "extremely intransparent", it's just a little complicated.
And accountants are really cheap for small businesses.
And yet I had to pay $12.10 for my $10 Kagi subscription...
From how I understand it, VAT only applies from a certain amount of revenue, so they didn't have to pay it before but do now. Could be wrong though
I must have missed that, can you explain what you mean by that?
This old blog post summarises a lot of pain points: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Similar to Brave (and more recently Proton) I simply can't trust them, despite liking the idea of their respective services.
Excellent read, thanks!
After reading that essay I feel a lot more queasy about using Kagi. It's just that I really despise ads, but I'm willing to put up with it, if the search engine company is more ethical. For the moment I've downgraded my account from 10 to 5 bucks a month. I wasn't using any of the AI features anyway.