The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Strategic decision · 2026
Uruky bets Europeans will pay for an ad-free, EU-based Kagi alternative
A two-person Portuguese team quits Kagi to sell €5/mo ad-free search from EU providers only, no AI: 60 paid accounts in 3 months, then a 236-point HN launch.
Uruky
What the business is
A subscription search engine: metasearch across five Europe-based providers plus its own crawler-built index (Uruky Site Search), personalizable per user.
Starting capital：Bootstrapped, no investment. Founders cover a single server, provider API fees ($1–6 per 1,000 queries) and living costs from €5/month subscriptions.
How it started
Bruno Bernardino, a Portuguese software engineer, and his wife Patrícia were paying Kagi customers for years — Bruno even contributed to its browser extension — before falling out with where it was headed: AI summaries, mail, drive. In February 2026 they shipped Uruky, their idea of what Kagi used to be: simpler, ad-free, EU-based, €5/month. Patrícia, a Philosophy graduate who keeps away from tech, shaped the UX and ran legal and accounting while Bruno built.
What happened
The launch Show HN on 2026-02-16 drew just 10 points; a follow-up in March drew 2. Iterating anyway, they added image search, URL rewrites, and a home-grown index (Uruky Site Search, a crawl-and-search product for website owners). An independent interview on 21 May 2026 reported 60 paying accounts in under three months; a third Show HN on 4 June 2026 hit the front page with 236 points and 240 comments, pushing the service past 100 monthly active accounts.
How it ended up
Still live as of 2026-09-03, adding features and growing the index. The founder set a hard milestone: 500 monthly paid accounts within 18 months, or shutdown and release of the source code.
Background
Uruky is a paid, ad-free search engine founded in Portugal in early 2026 by engineer Bruno Bernardino and his wife Patrícia. It grew out of their years as Kagi customers: Bruno had even contributed to Kagi's browser extension, but both disagreed with the product's expansion into AI summaries, mail, drive, and news. Their counter-proposal was deliberately minimal — search only, €5/month, Europe-based, with no account email and, by explicit stance, no generative AI.
The business runs on a principle borrowed from Mullvad: minimum data. Subscribers are identified by an account number, the payment-account link exists in the database for only 15 days, and results come from five European providers — Mojeek, Marginalia, Linkup, Serper, and EUSP, the EU index championed by Qwant and Ecosia — plus Uruky's own crawler-built index. After provider fees and taxes, a €5/month subscription nets the couple under 40%.
Early traction on Hacker News was slow — the February 2026 launch post drew 10 points, a March follow-up 2 — but an interview with The Privacy Dad blog on 21 May 2026 reported 60 paid accounts in under three months, and a third Show HN on 4 June 2026 hit the front page with 236 points and 240 comments, crossing 100 monthly active accounts. The founder frames the goal as proving an ethical, ad-free search business can be sustainable; the stop condition is explicit: if 500 paid accounts are not reached within 18 months, the service shuts down and the source code is released.
What has to be true
- Charging €5/month with a Mullvad-style account number makes the privacy promise structural: no email, no profile, nothing to sell — and that answers 'why pay when DuckDuckGo is free?'
- Scoping to search-only and refusing generative AI is what separates it from Kagi at a glance, and keeps cost and attention on the one feature users pay for.
- Restricting providers to European engines ties the product to a real wave — EUSP, the EU index backed by Qwant and Ecosia — and gives EU users a concrete reason to switch.
- Offering the source code after 12 months (or AGPLv3 at 300 accounts) converts trust from marketing into a contract — rare in search, and cheap to promise when the alternative is shutdown.
What can be applied
Refuse everything the incumbent added and make the privacy promise auditable — account number, no email, code handover after 12 months — then charge plainly for what remains.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-03 Uruky remains a two-person business in live operation, adding features (image search, URL rewrites, the Uruky Site Search index product) and growing paid accounts off the June Hacker News spike. Outreach is done without ads — the founders sponsor privacy and open-source projects and court privacy-focused journalists instead. The survival milestone: 500 monthly paid accounts within 18 months of May 2026, after which the service either stabilizes or shuts down and releases its code.
Sources
- Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites
- Interview with the Engineer of Uruky, a Private Search Engine
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe what you are building, and see who is betting on the same thing.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card