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How a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I crunched the numbers in another comment.

Supposedly $5 for 300 searches a month is enough for most people - they claim on average people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month. However, when you phrase that as 10 searches per day you can easily imagine that you might go over your 300 per month every now and then.
Additional searches are 1.5c each, or $4.50 for 300 searches.
$10 gets you 1,000 searches per month. 1c per search if you use them all.
$25 per month is unlimited, but you get 15% discount if you pay a year up front - $255.
You would need to make 1,833 searches a day with the $10 per month plan for the $255 annual plan to be worth considering.

I agree that it's too expensive. The fact that their individual search rate is cheaper than the lowest tier monthly search annoys me. Then, the only way to get less than 1c per search is to make more than 21,000 searches a year on the most expensive plan.

If I could share my account across a family or a small business, that might make sense, but otherwise it's asking a lot for only a small improvement over the competition.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair enough. I must say I didn’t even consider the per-search payment option - I just assumed it would be abusively expensive to encourage committing to a monthly fee, but clearly not! Thank you for demonstrating that so comprehensively.

That’s better but it still means I’d be using multiple search engines just so I don’t rack up costs indiscriminately. And honestly if I’m paying to use it that seems unnecessarily inconvenient.

$5/month for 100 searches per day (or something high enough I’d be unlikely to hit it when using it as my sole search engine) and I’d be totally willing to switch. As it is it’s just too expensive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah I mean even $5 for 400 would be ok, that's like 1.25c per search, and more likely to be something you don't tip over accidentally some months. That would still fit in with $10 for 1,000 - so long as you make ~~800~~ 733.3 searches a month it's better definitely value.

Right now, at 1.66c per search ($5 for 300), you would need to make 600 searches for $10 to be better value. However, in the $5 plan you'd pay less after 300 searches (1.5c each), so it's actually 633.3 searches to break even, under the current price plan.