Sören Hentzschel wrote in a blog post on Saturday that Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, is planning to launch a premium service called MDN Plus next month. It is reported that this service is designed to provide developers with extended free MDN Web documentation resources.
Although Mozilla’s current major revenue comes from rival and search giant Google, the agreement between the two parties is due to expire next year, and it is difficult to predict whether it will be renewed.
Even in the event of a failed renewal, Mozilla has other financial options, but it has changed its revenue-generating strategy in recent years. For reference in 2020, Mozilla reported revenue of $496 million, most of which came from deals in the default search engine of the Firefox browser ($441 million).
Disregarding the one-time payment received during the year, it was only a slight increase of $6 million from 2019. Elsewhere, mainly subscription-based services, revenue increased from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020.
In addition, Mozilla has launched other products, including Firefox Relay Premium and Mozilla VPN, which may help it increase its overall subscription-based service revenue.
Closer to home, Sören Hentzschel revealed that Mozilla is expected to launch the new MDN Plus service as early as March 2022, and the launch is expected to cover the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and other market regions.
In fact, as early as last summer, Mozilla had already launched a test of MDN Plus and confided that it plans to launch the idea to the public in the future. Through a subscription-based service, MDN Plus provides in-depth technical documentation from experts and other features to improve the MDN Web Docs experience (including offline/favorites/change notifications/topic options, etc.).
In terms of pricing, Sören Hentzschel expects a monthly fee of $10/an annual fee of $100.