As much as people gush over Kagi on HN, I still have yet to actually try it because I cannot for the life of me get authentication to work. Even after immediately resetting my password, I get an "incorrect email or password" or "try again later" error on the login page. I've tried at least 3 times over the last few months with the same results each time.
If such a fundamental part of a web service company's website is broken, it makes me weary of their competence.
No and I think it's kind of absurd that I would have to reach out to support staff so that I can get something as basic as account log in working correctly.
I'm confident that account login is working for most people. Potentially something weird has happened with you account and it requires manual intervention. This is exactly what support is for - handling weird situations.
My point is that this is a service that I was curious about but have no real need for. I'm mostly satisfied by using Google or DDG. As a customer, it's pretty absurd that the onus is on me to spend a fairly significant amount of time contacting support in order to simply evaluate a niche product. Furthermore, the company is a tech company, so the fact that their authentication is bugged, seems like more than enough of a reason to not spend any more of my time evaluating their service. I literally can't think of any web based products I currently use which have, at any point, had bugged authentication.
It's understandable that such a basic seeming issue would negatively impact your opinion of the service, but it's also worth considering that such a basic issue must surely be some sort of unique edge case if the vast majority of other people are claiming to be happily using the service (which implies being able to log into their accounts).
Of course you don't owe Kagi anything so you don't have to reach out to support, but just something to consider before questioning someone's competence.
You would expect this to work, but you also shouldn't be surprised that a beta project isn't perfect.
If you need the ability to login reliably and a search engine that never goes down, stick to google.
If you want to help a new entrant with a product that reliably outperforms Google search get their product battle-ready, then give them a bit of a chance to make it right.
If such a fundamental part of a web service company's website is broken, it makes me weary of their competence.