Perplexity Pro vs You.com vs Kagi: is a paid AI search engine worth it?

Perplexity Pro is $20 a month. You.com Pro is $9.99. Kagi's unlimited tier is $10. Three products, three different ideas of what you're paying for, and the price gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is 2x for reasons that have nothing to do with search quality.

Kagi isn't really an AI-answers product first — it's a paid, ad-free search engine that happens to bolt on AI summaries and its own assistant. You pay for the index, not the chat. Perplexity is the opposite: an AI research assistant with a search engine underneath it, built for people who want a sourced paragraph instead of ten blue links. You.com sits in between, cheaper than Perplexity, less purist than Kagi.

| | Price | What you're actually buying |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi Professional | $10/mo | unlimited private search, no ads, small AI layer |
| You.com Pro | $9.99/mo | AI chat + search, generous usage |
| Perplexity Pro | $20/mo | deep research mode, more citations, file upload, image gen |

Kagi Starter, at $5 for 300 searches, is the cheapest way to try paid search at all, and it's genuinely enough for a light user who mostly wants Google without the ads and the SEO sludge.

None of these three replace the free tier of the other two entirely. If you already pay for ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, you may not need a fourth $20 subscription just for search — the free tiers of Perplexity and You.com cover a lot of casual lookups. Where the paid plans earn their keep is **deep research**: multi-step queries where the tool reads a dozen pages, cross-references them, and hands you something closer to a memo than a search-results page.

Our honest read: try Kagi Starter first if privacy and a clean results page are what you actually want. Go straight to Perplexity Pro if your job involves research and you'll use the deep-research mode weekly. Skip a third AI subscription if you're already paying for two.