You do have to login to your account. And they know which accounts are linked together on a bill.
Maybe I don’t understand the question.What prevents one account from being used by multiple people?
Alternatively, I have 3 computers, a phone, and a tablet. What prevents Kagi from banning me for sharing my account even though all of the devices are mine and I’m the only one using them?
If you use the token, it works with private tabs and VPNs. I don’t share my account, but I do use those things and I’ve never had an issue. I don’t see how they could know the difference with a shared account vs multiple devices. I search from my phone, my work PC, my vpn’d laptop constantly all day. They might have some system that hashes your IP, and if there’s more than 4 matching hashes in an hour throw a flag.
Is your original question a privacy focused one, or a service level question?
Service question. My concern is getting flagged inaccurately since they offer the duo plan.
Oh! Multiple people using the same account. Yah you can probably do that just fine. It would just mean everyone has the same settings, and shares the same search count if on the $5 plan.
I have PC, Laptop, and a phone with 2 profiles, so basically 4 devices. I’m very happy that I never got any issues and I hope this will stay. But of course someone will still share accounts…
afaik, they don’t. What they do log is the number of searches. So they might get suspicious if you search way more than expected.
A little while ago, there was an outage which was ultimately caused by a few accounts abusing the system with unreasonably many searches and those (rightfully) had their accounts terminated. So yes, they do look for that.
I highly doubt they’d get suspicious on a small scale or even have any monitoring set up for that. People have all kinds of circumstances, so access from different IP addresses isn’t necessarily multiple users either.
It’s like theft at a grocery store. A poor person stealing a little food for themselves won’t affect their bottom line very much but organised criminal groups targetting high-value items will destroy it.
