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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

I get it, but do you really think there are enough people willing to pay a subscription to keep Mozilla's business alive?

At this point the average consumer is used to free stuff, and a subscription model would ensure that Firefox is only used by a niche audience.

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Not OP but I do. At this point in time it's clear who uses Firefox and it's not the masses. It's the ones like you and me. Maybe our closest loved ones, too.

It is doable. If there is an outrage, it would be manufactured.

How about the payed version has a solid VPN thrown in? And I mean a VPN using Mozilla infrastructure... Not a 3rd party.

There's a whole market around VPNs... So obviously enough money in that space.

> And I mean a VPN using Mozilla infrastructure... Not a 3rd party.

There is no Mozilla infrastructure. All their servers run in AWS.

> There is no Mozilla infrastructure. All their servers run in AWS.

Yes I know - that would be a good place to start though don't you think?

Would running their own servers actually be a good idea? Their workloads seem pretty well-served by AWS's offerings: services with extremely bursty traffic (like updates and TaskCluster CI) that can take advantage of the Elastic part of EC2, and mostly-static websites (like MDN and the Firefox installer) that can use a caching CDN like CloudFront.

have you seen AWS/azure/GCP data transfer fees? mozilla would go bankrupt overnight

I'm literally paying for the VPN product they have because its the only subscription service they really offer. I never use it because the linux integration is terrible. lol

Relay and pocket are subscription as well though, no?

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