Duck.ai vs Kagi Assistant Comparison

• Plus (monthly): USD 9.99/month or USD 99.99/year — price for DuckDuckGo's full 4-in-1 subscription (VPN + advanced Duck.ai models + Personal Information Removal + Identity Theft Restoration), NOT a Duck.ai-only tier
• Pro (monthly): USD 19.99/month or USD 199.99/year — same 4-in-1 bundle as Plus, plus Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol, higher reasoning effort, and 2x higher usage limits in Duck.ai

• Starter (monthly): USD 5.00/month, 300 searches/month, Kagi Assistant in Quick mode
• Starter (annual): USD 4.50/month billed as $54/year (10% annual discount)
• Professional (monthly): USD 10.00/month, unlimited search, Assistant Quick mode with a larger monthly allowance
• Professional (annual): USD 9.00/month billed as $108/year (10% annual discount)
• Ultimate (monthly): USD 25.00/month, unlimited search, Assistant Research mode plus flagship models
• Ultimate (annual): USD 22.50/month billed as $270/year (10% annual discount)

6 free models (Claude 4.5 Haiku, Mistral Small 4, GPT-5.4 nano, GPT-5.4 mini, gpt-oss-120b, Gemma 4 31B) available with no account; DuckDuckGo does not publish the exact daily message cap, only that one exists

No standing free tier for Assistant. The Trial plan offers 100 searches and 100 Assistant interactions before requiring a paid plan, and still requires creating an account.

By default, Duck.ai does not record or store any of your chats. Model providers commit to Zero Data Retention — deleting prompts and responses immediately after generating a reply — with one disclosed exception: prompts may be held in short-term memory for up to 1 hour for caching (to reduce cost and latency), but this cache is never written to disk.

Conversation threads are automatically deleted after one day by default; a thread can also be deleted immediately by hand. A thread a user reports (for example, to flag a bug) is retained for 30 days before deletion for debugging purposes. Requests to the model backend are not saved or tied to a customer account by default, though Kagi notes they may be retained briefly as part of request debugging. On the model-provider side, retention varies by provider and is documented separately — see the Privacy Architecture section.

Legal entity Duck Duck Go, Inc.; company page confirms independent ownership, majority-owned by founder Gabriel Weinberg and team members since 2008.

Kagi Inc. is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California.