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by colesantiago·8mo ago·view on hn ↗
The 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.

5 comments
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.

Isn't Thunderbird (more or less) independent? "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."
Yeap. It's mentioned in their financial reports that user donations represent more than 99.9% of our annual revenue[0]. Also seems their staff is mainly engineers/developers, and all the expenses are concentrated to their product*. Thunderbird doing what Firefox should.

[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

*Though Thunderbird is Gecko-based so can be said in part, perhaps a significant one, they're depending on Firefox development.

It doesn't matter if they are or not really.

As of right now Thunderbird doesn't make any money, it relies on 'Donations' which isn't at all sustainable.

I can see Thunderbird is planning to do a pro plan, but it is behind a waitlist so the total sum of revenue Thunderbird is making relative to Google's $500M deal is close to zero.

Firefox relay is open source (https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay) and have paid plan (1€/month)
Even worse?

That means people can self host (for privacy and incase the private relays are unstable) and not give money to Mozilla.

Besides 1€/month is not going to cover anything of the costs to run the service.

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"

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.

How much do you pay to Thunderbird, just curious.
Equivalent of $5-6 monthly