Anonymity ​

We often get asked “how can you respect privacy when I need to login?” (Kagi requires an account because users have to pay to use it),

We believe that Kagi has the most user-friendly privacy policy of any search engine out there. However, privacy and anonymity are not the same things.

Several users interested in anonymity have expressed interest in anonymous payment methods (usually involving crypto payments).

Implementing crypto payments remains a challenge as accounting/financial infrastructure requirements for this are more than Kagi can handle at this stage. There is no simple plug-and-play API for crypto like there is one for credit cards (we use Stripe). The complexity of different cryptocurrencies and the missing simple structures for recurring payments make it hard for us to tackle this at this time. It took some other companies (Mullvad comes to mind) more than a decade to come up with a solution for this problem.

However we believe Kagi is already anonymous in practice. Kagi requires no personal information to create an account (you can use any email to register including anonymous solutions like SimpleLogin). To hide their payment information, one can use a virtual debit card (such as PrivacyHQ). And even if you do not jump through these hoops, Kagi has you covered. We do not log searches or associate them with an account, by design - we have no use for it and it would just be a liability for us. There is no simple switch one can flip to enable this in case of a court order.