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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

i wonder why mozilla hasn't tried a premium pricing model? the premium version of firefox could have a yearly subscription of, say, $24. it would have all privacy features turned on, the best privacy addons installed, and all analytics/telemetry turned off, by default.

i would even pay a whole $3/month for that! =D

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The brand risk of having firefox associated with the free version would be horrendous.

To have a premium product, you need to have a non-premium product, and given that most users would use the non-premium product, firefox would quickly become associated with a browser that has the actually desirable features turned off...

Which would probably be even worse than their low market take up at the moment (and I am typing this on firefox).

I agree. Maybe they could differentiate the two versions with a badge or some adornment in the UI which appears grayed out in the “free” edition. I guess it’s the same as asking for donations but maybe not as blatant. Also not sure why they stopped selling merch. I would buy some right now.

Because if they suggest anything to remove the whales then their paymasters will veto it?

The people who would pay for a subscription are surely some of the most valuable for advertising to, and FF in its current form exists because of advertising.

They don’t want that but you are free to do so yourself, it’s free software.

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