Mozilla has recently announced its plans for its premium subscription service inside of Firefox that offers access to premium features like a VPN service or cloud storage. It’s still unclear exactly what the service will offer, but Mozilla CEO Chris Beard mentioned both a VPN service and cloud storage in an interview with t3n. Mozilla intends to begin offering subscriptions starting in October.
The details are all a little vague for now it’s not clear if this will be a single subscription service offering multiple features, or if these will be separate subscription services. But at least one subscription option is confirmed to be on the way.
Mozilla wants to develop diverse sources of revenue so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser. Much of that money comes from a direct competitor in the browser market Google so it makes sense that Mozilla would want to build out a new way to make money.
Mozilla says that it won’t charge for any existing Firefox features as part of its shift to offering subscription services. Instead, it’s just using the fact that its browser is already present on a huge number of computers to sell added services to people, who by and large aren’t currently paying the company at all.
Dave Camp, senior vice president of Firefox, said in a statement “A high-performing, free and private-by-default Firefox browser will continue to be central to our core service offerings.”
Camp said that Firefox can serve users who are interested in premium features without compromising the development and reach of the existing products and services.
