Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo Subscription Pro-tier — private AI for AI power users (Ep.41)

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Chris (Partnerships) discuss the DuckDuckGo Subscription: the core protections, private AI, and how the new Pro-tier serves AI power users.

If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.

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Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo to discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In this episode, you are going to hear about our Pro subscription plan. And my guest today is Chris Calvi. Chris, do you wanna briefly introduce yourself before we jump in?

Chris: I— I would love to. Thank you for having me back. I was on— a quick ad for people who have not listened to the original subscription overview Duck Tales episode. Gabriel and I did that six months— I don’t know, actually probably nine months ago at this point. So go find that. But I’m coming to you from sunny New Jersey. And I’m a member of the partnerships team here at DuckDuckGo. And I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for about five years. I love it here. And most recently helped run efforts to add this new Pro plan to the subscription, which we’ll be talking about on this episode.

Beah: Nice. I’d like to think of this episode as the Pro edition of the previous podcast episode that you recorded with Gabriel.

Chris: Okay, that’s fair enough.

Beah: Just to set the bar.

Chris: Yeah.

Beah: All right, and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team, if this is your first time meeting me. And yeah, I think we can kind of jump in. Like, let’s start with— can you just explain, Chris, what even is the subscription, what we’re talking about?

Chris: Yeah, and I always like to start with, like, why the subscription first, and then I’ll say what the subscription is. So the why: you know, DuckDuckGo has a ton of fully featured, excellent, free-to-use, no-login-required functionality. And we’ve had that for, like, what, fifth— 17 years? How— how long has DuckDuckGo been on? We’ve had it for a very long time. And— and so we, though, realize that there are— there’s extra functionality and features and protections that we would like to offer to— to our users, that you can’t offer— either can offer free, for free, because they have a material c—, like, a substantial cost to us, or it can’t be, like, ad-supported like the search. So— so two years, a little over two years ago, we launched the DuckDuckGo subscription. And— and that includes four protections— that are aligned with what I just mentioned, things that we sort of, like, can offer for free. And so there’s the identity theft restoration, which internally we call IDTR. And that is essentially, if you—

Beah: Not me. I call it identity theft restoration because I try to avoid—