alt Hacker NewsThe state of Mozilla's current 'products':
Firefox
Mozilla VPN
Mozilla Monitor
Firefox Relay
MDN Plus
Thunderbird
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Some of these products are just repackaged partnerships.
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Firefox - Funded by Google with the search partnership bringing in $500M in revenue. (free)
Mozilla VPN - Repackaged Mullvad VPN and using Mullvad servers.
Mozilla Monitor - Repackaged HaveIBeenPwned. (free)
Firefox Relay - No different to Simplelogin and not open source. (free)
MDN Plus - Be honest, you wouldn't pay for this since this was offered for a long time for free, MDN is already free.
Thunderbird - Most likely funded by Google (free) (using Firefox Search Revenue)
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Be honest, would you pay for any of Mozilla's products when most of these can be found for free or close to free?
That is the problem.
Replies
Isn't Thunderbird (more or less) independent? "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."
Firefox relay is open source (https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay) and have paid plan (1€/month)
I am subscribed to recurrent donations to Thunderbird.
I would pay for Firefox if it was focused on privacy and customizabilty, not telemetry and LLMs.
people do pay for Kagi.
the question is more "how to replace the free money from google by real clients,and still get the same margin as google free money"
Part of the "problem" is that people don't care about any of those products, except Firefox.
Mozilla needs to figure out how much they need to maintain Firefox, nothing else. I suspect that's not the entirety of the $200 million they currently spend on "development costs". Everything else they receive in donations and partnership fees should go directly into an investment portfolio which will be used to keep Firefox development active in the future.
If they didn't care about anything else, the Google money could fund Firefox for at least two years per yearly fee.