At Kagi, our mission is simple: to humanise the web. We want to deliver a search experience that prioritises human needs, allowing you to explore the web effectively, privately, and without…
Kagi Assistant embodies these principles, working within the context of Kagi’s search results to provide a new way to interact with information. It’s built to make research easier while respecting your privacy and AI’s limits.
By making Kagi Assistant available to everyone, we’re giving all users the choice to explore this capability as part of their Kagi toolkit - at no additional cost to their subscription. Use it when and how it suits your workflow, knowing it’s built with privacy, responsibility, and human-centric values at its core.
Let’s talk about the specifics!
AI grounded in Kagi search, guided by you
When you enable web access, the Assistant has access to Kagi Search results. It will also respect your personalised domain rankings and allows the use of Lenses to narrow search scope.
Or, if you’d prefer to discuss directly with the model, you can also turn off web access. It also supports file uploads, allowing you to provide additional context or information for your queries.
Custom assistants tailored to your needs
Create specialized assistants with unique instructions, defining their purpose, context, and web access preferences. Need help with coding, grammar reviews, or diagnosing an issue with your classic VW Bus? Build an assistant for it.
Pro-tip: assign a custom bang (!name) for instant access via your browser’s search bar.
Refine and redirect with editing
Conversations don’t always go as planned. If a response misses the mark, Kagi Assistant lets you edit prompts, switch models, or adjust settings mid-thread. This ensures you stay in control and can redirect the conversation without starting over.
Privacy as a foundation
Your privacy is our priority. Assistant threads are private by default, automatically expire based on your settings, and your interaction data is not used to train AI models. This applies to both Kagi and third-party providers, under strict contractual terms.
Please see Kagi LLMs privacy for additional information.
A note on our fair-use policy
Providing powerful AI tools requires significant resources. To ensure sustainability, we’re starting to enforce our fair-use policy.
Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on your plan’s value. For example, a $25 monthly plan allows up to $25 worth of raw token cost across all models (there is a 20% built-in margin that we reserve for providing searches, development and infrastructure for the service). From our token usage statistics, 95% of users should never hit this limit.
While most users won’t be affected, those exceeding the generous threshold will have the possibility to renew their subscription cycle instantly. Soon, we’ll introduce credit top-ups for added flexibility. This approach ensures a fair, user-funded model while maintaining quality service and is a simple way to control usage, compared to arbitrary usage limits found in other services.
Your favourite models are waiting for you
Choose from a range of leading LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and more. You can switch models mid-thread and explore their performance through our regularly updated open-source LLM benchmark. Choice of models in non-Ultimate plans will be limited compared to our full offering in the Ultimate plan, please see below.
Access to your favourite LLMs makes Kagi Assistant mould to your requirements and query customisations, so we feature an array of models for you to choose from.
| Model Name | Plan |
|---|---|
| GPT 4o mini | All |
| GPT 4.1 mini | All |
| GPT 4.1 nano | All |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | All |
| Mistral Pixtral | All |
| Llama 3.3 70B | All |
| Llama 4 Scout | All |
| Llama 4 Maverick | All |
| Nova Lite | All |
| DeepSeek Chat V3 | All |
| GPT 4o | Ultimate |
| o3 mini | Ultimate |
| o4 mini | Ultimate |
| GPT 4.1 | Ultimate |
| ChatGPT 4o | Ultimate |
| Grok 3 | Ultimate |
| Grok 3 Mini | Ultimate |
| Claude 3.5 Haiku | Ultimate |
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet | Ultimate |
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking | Ultimate |
| Claude 3 Opus | Ultimate |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | Ultimate |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview | Ultimate |
| Mistral Large | Ultimate |
| Llama 3.1 405B | Ultimate |
| Qwen QwQ 32B | Ultimate |
| Nova Pro | Ultimate |
| DeepSeek R1 | Ultimate |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B | Ultimate |
Explore further
This is just the beginning for Kagi Assistant. Explore more in our documentation.
Happy fetching,
Team Kagi.
F.A.Q.
Q: Does using a less costly model (like DeepSeek) compared to larger ones use fewer credits?
A: Yes. The fair use policy calculates usage based on the actual cost charged by the model provider. Therefore, using smaller, less expensive models will allow for significantly more token usage compared to larger models.
Q: Does Kagi receive discounted rates from AI model providers?
A: No, Kagi does not receive discounts. However, we utilize smart caching techniques for the models to reduce operational costs, and these savings are passed on to the user.
Q: Why did Kagi start enforcing the fair use policy?
A: The policy was enforced due to excessive use. For instance, the top 10 users accounted for approximately 14% of the total costs, with some individuals consistently using up to 50 million tokens per week on the most advanced models. Our profit margins are already quite narrow. 95% of users should never hit any usage limits.
Q: What is the specific usage limit?
A: The limit corresponds directly to the monetary value of your Kagi plan, converted into an equivalent token amount. For example, a $25 plan provides $25 worth of token usage. This calculation includes a 20% margin for Kagi to cover search provision, development, and infrastructure costs. Savings achieved through prompt caching and other optimizations are passed on to you.
Q: Where can I view my token usage?
A: Currently, you can monitor your token usage on the Consumption page: https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption. We plan to display cost and interaction details more prominently soon, potentially on the billing page or directly within the Assistant interface.
Q: I can not access Assistant!
A: We are doing staged rollout beginning with USA, full rollout scheduled by Sunday, 23:59 UTC. This will include other regions and even the trial plan.
Read the original article
Comments
> A note on our fair-use policy
> Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on your plan’s value.
Although I likely won't use Assistant, stuff like this is why I love Kagi. My relationship with them as a customer feels refreshingly transparent; I can't think of any other consumer SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does this make money?" question.
(Compare, say, Discord. It's best in class, but eternally unprofitable - which makes me wary that it might fold or go to hell at the drop of a hat.)
The thing still giving me pause is a lack of "bring your own model connection" between saas uh services.
If I already pay for Gemini Advanced (or OpenAI/ChagtGPT Pro), I then have to pay for it again at every service that offers a Pro 2.5 (or 4.1/4o) tier. I should be able to connect my Gemini Advanced access to any service that offers Flash and be able to upgrade. Signing up for a bunch of services is starting to feel like being triple, quadruple or more dipped. Similar to how I am annoyed seeing media content cross licensed to three streaming services and not getting a bill reduction when subscribed to multiple services with the same content.
By eightysixfour 2025-04-1815:053 reply I really feel like the software model is going to start to break in a couple of ways in the near future.
Instead of vertical software slices, many people are going to want their single “horizontal” agent that they pay for (e.g Gemini Advanced, Claude) and connectivity to all of their other services.
MCP (which I personally think is a mediocre protocol, so it will probably win) as the glue for a bunch of services we OAUTH against and choose when our agents do/do not have access to certain tools.
The idea of a “GPT” App Store from OpenAI was sort of right, but just wrong enough. We are going to have an App Store inside of our preferred AI platform and subscribe/connect our other services from there.
I prefer identity as the top layer. Give me an identity portal that acts as an account manager, access to api layer, let me perform password resets, and let me avoid 2fa if I’m logged into my identity manager account. It should allow bidirectional control: both what services have access to my identity, and what services anything in my identity are granted access to access. Things like LLM, cloud storage etc should be obscured away from services so they can’t tell my storage providers from one another. All access between services should cascade down from my identity portal.
Who is going to pay for identity as a product and not just expect it as a free feature of another product suite?
By basch 2025-04-1820:20 Why not both? Use Apple or Microsoft or a third party identity provider.
By jcgl 2025-04-1910:12 I mean, that sounds basically like Oauth provided by the LLM provider, right? The provider just needs to build out the features.
By siva7 2025-04-1818:06 No question, the openai gpt marketplace/store was a birth failure and doesn't make much sense in hindsight anymore. I just don't understand why they don't pull the plug and admit it's a failure.
Your intuition regarding the shift from vertical to horizontal integration is spot on!
Sam Altman, in a recent Stratechery interview, detailed parts of OpenAI's future strategy that align with your prediction — a persistent, personalized AI. He envisions users interacting with OpenAI not just through core products but also across other applications.
Altman described a key part of the strategy: "...we have this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can take your bundle of credits and your customized model and everything else anywhere you want to go".
This system aims to create a portable AI experience and by virtue, would usurp the vertical software business model that has historically dominated the software economy. A horizontal play, that sits in the middle collecting their tidy sum of the pot will require a very compelling argument. That would require a low barrier to integrate for developers coupled with a value-add proposition that is meaningful and not possible for anyone other than the largest technology companies.
As you know, it’s sort of the Wild West of tech right now. OpenAI is looking to find a territory in the AI landscape and make their stake now, and I think this is the correct strategy. We have seen what being the first to market with a great product can do for the longevity and growth of tech companies - especially the consumer markets. They have the name recognition, forever embedded in the lexicon of the internet, and a great product vision that will lead to critical mass adoption that and what awaits them is the coveted moat, at least in the consumer market, that AI companies have been struggling to find out in the Wild West of AI.
Altman mentioned wanting users to "be able to sign in with your personal AI that's gotten to know you over your life". This sign-in would ideally carry "your memory and who you are and your preferences and all that sort of thing" across different integrated services.
The OpenAI SSO login will be the Trojan horse and later on the app developers will either be incentivized by OpenAI or compelled to integrate their products because of the compelling value proposition it would bring to bare with an integrated personalized AI assistant, complete with its memory and preferences.
Lastly, I suspect this is one of the driving motivations to become a consumer hardware company as there is little to no chance that current players (Apple, Google, Meta) would allow the same 1st party access to their internal API’s would be a requirement for what Altman has laid out for OpenAI moving forward.
By freehorse 2025-04-1819:29 I understand we some may want that, but why should everybody else want that? I operate in several contexts. I want some kind of models in one context and one in another. I want the AI to be contextualised within each use, not “personalised” on me. Yeah sure it would be great if it had memory within some project, but I would rather not have memory between projects or use cases that are irrelevant to each other.
By esafak 2025-04-1816:02 The industry solution to this is to create an open standard for AI memory.
By everforward 2025-04-1814:412 reply I doubt that fits in the usage model for those pricing plans. They're priced assuming it's inconvenient and less used because of it. I keep hearing they're losing money anyways, so despite being triple or quadruple dipped you're still paying less than it costs to run the models.
How would it cost Kagi anything, if I bring my own keys and all the costs are offloaded to my personal Google/ChatGPT account? I pay them the $10/month and get the Unlimited Pro access (but only to models I subsidize the cost of.) If anything it would save them money to offload my usage to my account vs using up some of their Flash tier quota.
It would be ideal for them for LLM access portability to let them offer higher end models and have the end consumer pay directly for the usage.
Id much rather pay for one AI License, and a small fee to each service I use, rather than paying a high tier AI Bonus price at every single service.
By macrocosmos 2025-04-1815:211 reply I think they might be talking about the cost to the model providers.
Then Google should offer Advanced Portable for $30 that includes being able to plug it into third party services. With some kind of policing to prevent it from being used as the entire backend to a service (for all users) itself.
By everforward 2025-04-1816:081 reply Third party usage is too disparate for a single flat rate to make sense. Perplexity probably uses orders of magnitude more tokens than Kagi does (the former uses tokens on every search, the latter only does if you manually invoke the Assistant).
Then there's the disparity in how many third party services each user uses. Some will use one, some will use 50. Google could charge per integration, but that's basically the status quo.
Why would the number of integrations be the price point and not token tiers? I might want to connect my account to 100 services to test them, but only perform a couple uses each before forgetting about it.
By everforward 2025-04-1822:351 reply I agree that makes sense, but it makes potential subscribers to the third parties nervous. I like Kagi Assistant because my payment is capped.
I get nervous plugging my pay-as-you-go API keys into random software because of the risk they rack up a $1000 bill doing something I wouldn’t have paid $20 for them to do.
The other three things are that economies of scale make it cheaper for Kagi to buy a bajillion tokens, Google et al don’t want to manage the customer side of things (what service ate how many tokens?), and service providers don’t want you seeing their “magic” in your console. Seems like there’s a lot of power in the system instruction side of things, and Perplexity probably doesn’t want you seeing their prompt.
By basch 2025-04-194:15 So let me lock it down. When I add the key, let me tell my provider this service is allowed 3% of my capacity before it’s locked out.
By yellowapple 2025-04-2022:00 > I keep hearing they're losing money anyways
Hearing from whom?
By weird-eye-issue 2025-04-187:041 reply I've paid for a monthly subscription with Discord for years
They also have ads in the app and they have other monetization features...
Revenue != profit. Discord, like almost every 2010s SaaS startup, has revenue (from your Nitro) - but not nearly enough to cover expenses.
> Revenue != profit
And for over a decade most companies talk only about revenue, which is infuriating. Because most startups and tech darlings survive only by continuous infusion of unlimited investor money.
I worked for 4 startups that were operating for years at a loss with revenue, all are profitable today and all were acquired.
My current startup is also not profitable, we're burning money but we're already signing big contracts and I hope in a year or two we keep growing rather than become profitable (1B+ valuation in a year).
Becoming profitable, even at this point is just a matter of deciding to stop expanding - but neither us nor our investors want this given there is so much potential for growth and more revenue streams on the line.
this is ycombinator's news aggregators, I suspect you're not going to get a "don't take risks and build things" vibe - it's a startup accelerator after all :).
> all are profitable today and all were acquired.
They are either profitable or acquired :)
> Becoming profitable, even at this point is just a matter of deciding to stop expanding
Yeah, growth at all costs is one of the defining factors.
> it's a startup accelerator after al
The only business models for Y Combinator startups are:
- run indefinitely long on unlimited investor money
- get sold to the highest bidder at some nebulous market valuation
Becoming profitable never enters the picture :)
By sebastiennight 2025-04-1810:261 reply > They are either profitable or acquired :)
Why? Once a company has been acquired, does it automatically fall out of profitability?
If it's acquired in a stock sale, it remains an independent entity and still has a P&L
If it's acquired/merged in an asset sale (not usually a good sign), it can still be assessed whether the new division is profitable - except in some rare cases like Google (allegedly!) not wanting to itemize some of their divisions to avoid too much regulatory scrutiny on monopoly positions.
> Becoming profitable never enters the picture :)
Seems very wrong based on looking at YC's portfolio, which apparently includes a bunch of profitable startups
> Once a company has been acquired, does it automatically fall out of profitability?
It becomes a part of the company that bought it?
> Seems very wrong based on looking at YC's portfolio, which apparently includes a bunch of profitable startups
It contains very few profitable startups. Those are the exceptions.
By sebastiennight 2025-04-1813:03 > It becomes a part of the company that bought it?
Not necessarily. As I explained above, most successful acquisitions are stock sales, in which case the acquiring company now owns the startup (they hold the shares). The startup is still a separate entity at this point.
Google is known for just merging the acquired startups into their product line (and/or killing them), but it's not a hard rule that all acquisitions are mergers.
For example, AFAIK Livestream is still a subsidiary of Vimeo (ie wholly owned, but separate): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo_Livestream
So Livestream can be profitable or not, separately from whether its acquirer is.
> most startups and tech darlings survive only by continuous infusion of unlimited investor money.
Investors making long bets is a good thing, I’d argue.
By troupo 2025-04-1813:00 The bets are invariably: sell to the highest bidder, exit through inflated IPO and/or speculative "market capitalization".
There are a few outliers like "let's subsidize this price dumping until all competitors are dead and then we recoup money by being a de facto monopoly"
By weird-eye-issue 2025-04-188:191 reply They are profitable
And besides my point was that it's pretty clear what their monetization is and that it's not some mystery
By RadiozRadioz 2025-04-189:012 reply > They are profitable
Citation needed. With this type of company and business model, it's highly unusual to be profitable, so the burden of proof is on those who say it is.
They are apparently not profitable (yet):
> Discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in funding. It has more than $700 million in cash on its balance sheet and the goal to become profitable this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034705/discord-layoffs-...
By gchamonlive 2025-04-1810:071 reply People shouldn't add insult to injury. Just because someone failed to do proper research and documentation doesn't make it ok for others to make the same mistake. People should lead by example, not by shunning.
By weird-eye-issue 2025-04-1812:461 reply > I can't think of any other consumer SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does this make money?" question.
My reply was in response to the above quote and not whether they are currently profitable or not. Besides, a company being profitable at this very moment is actually not that relevant in the long term.
By lotsofpulp 2025-04-1812:52 > Besides, a company being profitable at this very moment is actually not that relevant in the long term.
It’s pretty relevant, especially for a business that is 9 years old, and has no hardware R&D/manufacturing component.
Not enough to cover expenses? Do you understand what you're saying? That they're running a deficit for 15 years. Companies must make profit, or they vanish. They clearly make a profit, otherwise they would no longer exist.
By inglor 2025-04-187:44 They raise more capital and get more debt and try to lower burn rate but the original comment was talking about the 2010s mindset of "growth before profit" where you want more users/revenue to get acquired by a bigger player that can better monetize you.
The fact Discord isn't profitable (and hasn't been) is well documented.
Also, operating at a loss isn't necessarily bad (i.e. if you expand or spend more on R&D your profits shrink). Companies might choose to spend more on R&D and not be profitable (e.g. Amazon for a long time).
By MrJohz 2025-04-187:54 I'm not a business person, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this is common for a lot of smaller startups and tech companies.
If you can raise funds outside of revenue (i.e. outside of directly selling your products), you can keep operating even if you're not actually generating any income directly. Typically that will be in the form of investment and loans. So even if your expenses (incl. repayments for outstanding loans etc) are higher than your revenue, you can stay in business as long as you can convince enough investors that it's still worth their while to give you their money.
I don't know whether this is true for Discord specifically, but I understand it's a fairly common strategy, especially for companies where their best chance of success is by being the only player in a given market.
By Zetaphor 2025-04-1818:41 It took Uber 15 years to make their first profit
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...
By weird-eye-issue 2025-04-1815:18 This is particularly an ironic comment given that this is the forum run by a company that invests in companies that are not yet profitable and are often not profitable for years if ever
By kerkeslager 2025-04-189:231 reply > Companies must make profit, or they vanish.
Oh, buddy. That's how it's supposed to work, but that is not how it works at all.
By kerkeslager 2025-04-2118:04 Companies can exist for decades without making a profit, as long as they can keep borrowing money.
The strategy here is often just trying to operate at a loss longer than your competition. If your competition finally can no longer borrow, you buy them up and have a monopoly on the market, allowing you to price gouge.
There are other reasons a lender might lend to a perpetually-unprofitable company. For example, you might lend to a company to maintain a competitor who doesn't really compete, in order to avoid a monopoly breakup, or lend to a holding company that holds product with no intention to sell it, in order to maintain artificial scarcity (i.e. housing, diamonds).
Note that in none of these examples are you competing to provide the best products at the lowest prices.
By sevg 2025-04-187:52 This is a big misconception (though not one I’m used to seeing in the HN crowd).
Companies can operate at a deficit for many years without vanishing, usually because they have venture capital funding or investor backing.
By manquer 2025-04-190:30 Having a good ethos before significant funding rounds is one thing , it is lot harder once you raise a ton of external money.
It is not big bad VC either, VC funding while demanding is still lot more forgiving than Private equity or public markets . It is nature of a free economy to be as efficient as possible which in turn makes it affordable and accessible to class of users who would not have been do so before .
If the staff sees this - please stop preventing zoom. Not only is that bad for accessibility, it makes the article less useful for everyone - there's a screenshot included showing off the feature, but it's too small to read on the phone and I can't zoom in.
Firefox on Android has an accessibility setting called "Zoom on all web sites" that gets around this. Firefox's reader mode would help with this as well.
It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites being accessible by default :/
By kevincox 2025-04-1816:37 Unfortunately there is no per-site override. So you get to the occasional site that you don't want to zoom (like a game where the zoom gesture does something in-game) that is unusable with this global setting enabled :(
The original android browser had something much better, zoom until the size was right, double tap to reflow to fit
The new one has an extension that reflows on zoom. https://github.com/emvaized/text-reflow-on-zoom-mobile, it is quite useful.
Nice, I wouldn't want it to be automatic after pinch but that looks promising and I'm sure could be modded, maybe pinch zoom and then if you keep holding the two fingers without moving much for X amount of time it reflows
By onli 2025-04-188:14 Yeah, it is sometime annoying when text reflows if you only want to look closer at an image. But most of the time it's not really an issue, you just need to reposition. Maybe give it a try anyway :)
By jakub_g 2025-04-1811:57 Opera Android does support reflowing.
By viraptor 2025-04-187:06 That's amazing! I'm already on FF on Android and didn't realise they introduced it. Thank you so much. I'll finally be able to see the small images on medium and substack!
By seth_at_kagi 2025-04-1815:30 Hey - One of our engineers has fixed this. Please try again!
I can look into it. Can you clarify what you mean? Article zooms in normally for me (Orion browser/iOS).
By ilt 2025-04-1812:51 OP might have meant that pinch and zoom is locked in and that’s why they can’t zoom into that screenshot?
Edit: I can zoom in perfectly in my browser - Safari on iPhone - here.
By setsewerd 2025-04-1813:36 Not sure if you mean you work at Kagi, but I also want to add that when opening the Android app, the splash page takes a full second or so to load before the search bar opens, which doesn't sound like much but it makes it harder to habitually use Kagi as my default mobile search.
The Kagi widget technically solves this, but without installing a new launcher I can't replace the native Google search bar with the Kagi one.
It's blocked on Firefox on Android. Another comment quoted the meta tag which disables it.
What browser prevents this actually? None of the browsers (even mobile) I just quickly tested just... worked? No extensions.
By jddj 2025-04-189:10 I think Safari just outright ignores the maximum-scale property.
By catlikesshrimp 2025-04-185:521 reply I can zoom in
Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447), hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0
ublock origin enable zoom in all websites
Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?
https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...
By viraptor 2025-04-187:12 Yeah, I know the workarounds. This is more of a "complain publicly to maybe fix this specific case, but mostly raise awareness for people who will build the next thing".
By dean2432 2025-04-185:56 This has been bugging me as well.
By GrayShade 2025-04-186:08 You can open it in a new tab and zoom there.
By scary-size 2025-04-185:501 reply I can zoom just fine on mobile Safari.
So what?
His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0">
I jumped on this bandwagon long back for preventing horizontal scrollbars and other issues. Is there an updated advice for allowing zoom and being responsive?
By ericrallen 2025-04-1812:26 “Allowing zoom” and “being responsive” are not two states at odds with one another.
Preventing zooming is a serious accessibility issue and it makes the content worse for every user.
If you’re properly setting responsive widths, a large enough base font size, large enough input text size, and using border-box for box-sizing, things should just work except for cases where you’re absolutely positioning things or telling them not to word wrap and they are wider than the viewport.
By lobsterthief 2025-04-1812:44 There really is no bandwagon to jump onto here—most sites don’t prevent zooming in. Many that do were just misconfigured from the start, and because some popular mobile browsers ignore `maximum-scale=1.0`, the issue isn’t normally identified.
Quick tip: Make sure all of your inputs are at least 16px font size. This will prevent most mobile browsers from “automatically” zooming in when an input is focused ;) Which is a common reason people employ the maximum-scale property.
By jacobwinters 2025-04-1815:33 Kagi employee here. I hate it when sites block zooming. Didn't realize our blog was doing it :S
Our site's been fixed, and I opened a PR upstream.
By i_love_retros 2025-04-1811:223 reply Kagi are one of my favorite companies. In a world where buying a T-shirt requires me to hand over my phone number ("in case we need to contact you about your order" - yeah, right) I find it so refreshing that kagi barely require any info from me except some form of payment.
By justinrubek 2025-04-1812:131 reply At least you got your shirt. I waited for many, many months, where I consistently checked to see if they were out. They happened to release them during a very short window of time in which I didn't go to my email; I never got to have the shirt.
By dgellow 2025-04-1819:32
The shipping companies seem to demand it from the sender.
But they never use it so just fill in a random number.
By numpad0 2025-04-1812:53 They do if needed. AliExpress at one point required my address to be in full UTF-8 representation that I wasn't comfortable with, what I assume to have been the post office called me twice without caller ID, and the package got "delivered" to random neighborhood of the airport hundreds of miles away.
They don't call you if you live in a cleanly ASCII representable address with zero ambiguity and you don't have to be contacted from customs. Otherwise the courier do use the number.
By yencabulator 2025-04-2221:49 For what it's worth, UPS has called me multiple times when a nearby hill was too slippery for their truck to make it up. I met them at the base of the hill to pick up my package. Your experience != universal experience.
By hulk-konen 2025-04-1813:11 Yes
