Is Kagi worth it in 2026?

Professional is the plan to compare first. It gives you unlimited Kagi Search, which is the core product, plus Kagi Assistant in Quick mode with a larger monthly allowance than Starter. Billed yearly, it comes to $108 a year, or $9 a month, which saves $12 a year against paying monthly.

Starter, the cheapest paid plan, is the wrong one for most heavy users. Its cap of 300 searches a month averages to 10 a day. Someone who runs 15 searches on each working day would use up the 300 in 20 working days, so the cap bites before the month ends. At 600 searches a month, Professional works out to the same cost per search as a full Starter month, about 1.7 cents, and every search above that is cheaper.

Kagi Assistant is not unlimited, even on the top plan. Kagi's help page says the monthly plan sets your token usage allowance. On Ultimate that is $25 of token usage across all models, made up of $20 of raw model cost and $5 of operating cost. That operating share is the 20 percent margin Kagi builds into the allowance.

When you reach the limit, new AI interactions are disabled until your next billing cycle begins. Starter and Professional users can upgrade to keep going straight away, and Ultimate users can renew early. Yearly plans get the whole year's allowance at the start, so the Ultimate yearly plan carries $270 of token usage for twelve months. Premium models are available only on Ultimate, and bundle plans such as Ultimate share one limit across their products.

Kagi's launch blog says 95 percent of users should never hit this limit, and that smaller, cheaper models stretch the allowance a long way. That is a reassuring average, but it comes from the company's own statistics. If you run long research threads, rely on premium models or upload large files every day, plan around the dollar cap rather than the headline price.

Kagi's family plans cut the cost for a household. Duo is $14 a month for two Professional accounts, which is $6 a month less than two separate Professional plans, or $72 a year. The Family plan is $20 a month for up to six Professional accounts. Four people on individual Professional plans would pay $40 a month, so Family saves $20 a month, or $240 a year, before tax. Billed yearly, Duo comes to $151.20 a year and Family to $216.

Teams are billed per user per month. A Professional seat costs the same as an individual Professional plan, and an Ultimate seat costs 2.5 times as much. The team pricing views list monthly per-user prices only.

Five seats on Professional cost $50 a month, or $600 a year, and five on Ultimate cost $1,500 a year, both before tax. Individual members can be moved up to Ultimate for $15 a month each, so a five-person team with two people on Ultimate pays $80 a month, or $960 a year, before tax. Those upgrades are the line to check first when you budget for a team.

Kagi says it has no ads, no tracking and no noise, and that it is funded by its users rather than advertisers. Those are the company's own statements, printed on its pricing page, and they are the main reason to pay instead of using free search. They are not independently verified on this page, so read Kagi's privacy terms before you rely on them for sensitive work.

Kagi's company history gives some context. Kagi was founded in May 2018 in Palo Alto by Vladimir Prelovac, and the founder bootstrapped it for its first four years. It raised its first outside money from users in 2023 and became a public benefit corporation in 2024. Kagi Search entered public beta in 2022, and the Assistant left beta and became generally available in 2024.

Free search is enough if you search a few times a week, do not mind ads and have no need for AI answers. Kagi's free trial is the low-risk way to decide. It gives you 100 searches and 100 Kagi Assistant interactions with no commitment, which is enough to judge whether the results beat what you use now before you pay.

Our Ahrefs data: "kagi pricing" gets about 100 US searches a month, and "is kagi worth it" gets about the same. That is a small audience, which fits a niche paid product rather than a mass-market one.