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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.

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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.

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