Hacker News Reader

Comment by SimeVidas | Hacker News Reader

Why not create a Firefox+ subscription service (for like $10 per month) and then make Send, Notes, VPN, and more exclusive to that service?

Some people over here are dying to start paying for Firefox.

(Mozilla donations go to the much smaller non-profit part of Mozilla and are unrelated to Firefox.)

View on HN

I am in this same boat. I recently signed up for Firefox Private Network and I'm in the process of switching over to Mozilla VPN. I think both of these services are great (even if they're essentially white-labels of other companies products) and they're the kinds of things I associate with Mozilla and Firefox. I would also pay for their password manager if it were a little more robust (and if they charged for it) just to get the tight browser integration.

Mozilla's deal with Google is worth 500M per year. For Firefox to be independant of Google, you'd need around 4M people subscribing to Firefox, with your $10/mo suggestion.

Now, whether Firefox NEEDS 500M per year is a different matter, but the whole idea of 'some people want to pay for Firefox' seems rather naive as a suggestion for how Firefox can be viable without Google.

I didn’t suggest that the subscription could replace the Google deal. I merely said, why not make the services paid instead of closing them.

Perhaps because of opportunity cost. Compared to how dependant on Google they are currently, maintaining a comparatively low-revenue service whose existance must be justified to a board, may be worse than doing the 'startup' thing of just pivoting _again_ and using those same developers to try and find something that _can_ sustain Firefox; something that can be a core offering and keep Firefox relevant in the market, rather than a small add-on subscription service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com