Mozilla might launch Firefox Premium in 2019

[harlan4096]

Mozilla CEO Chris Beard confirmed in an interview that the organization plans to offer premium services in the near future.

Mozilla is aware of the organization's dependency on search and the revenue that it brings in. About 90% of the overall revenue of Mozilla comes from search deals at the time of writing, the remaining ten percent from Pocket, donations, and other revenue sources.

Firefox Premium is an attempt to diversify Mozilla's revenue without limiting or restricting any of the existing services.

Beard mentions a VPN service as an example of a premium service. Mozilla could offer a free basic VPN service to all of its users and a paid version with improved functionality and features on top of that.

The practice is not uncommon; several VPN providers offer a free basic version with limited bandwidth, server availability or speed, and an upgraded paid product that does away with the limits or extends them. It is unclear if the VPN service would be run by Mozilla or if the organization would cooperate with an existing provider.

Mozilla did cooperate with ProtonVPN in the past already to offer VPN services to Firefox users.

The only other service that Beard mentions in the interview is a data storage service but no information was provided in the interview. Companies that offer data storage services often use a freemium model as well. Users may sign up and get a couple of Gigabytes of storage as free users; those that require more may pay a monthly or yearly fee to get more online storage.

Beard mentioned that Mozilla is considering several premium service options and that Mozilla is aiming for an official release in October 2019.

Mozilla plans to launch individual services in the future. The interview suggests that the organization could launch these services for free initially and premium options later on.

Tip: Check out the best VPN add-ons for Firefox.