For more than a decade, we’ve been able to count on one crucial piece of software being available entirely for free: web browsers. But that may soon change. Mozilla plans to start offering a 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.
VPN and cloud storage capabilities. Beard’s answers sounded more hypothetical in detail than the announcement of guaranteed features, but he did give some insight into what a premium Firefox might offer. One example Beard gave was a hypothetical situation where a user wanted to do some online banking over public wifi. That user would get a “certain amount of free VPN bandwidth, and then offer a premium level over a monthly subscription.”
To be clear, Beard emphasized that Mozilla has no plans to charge fees for features that are currently free. We’ve reached out to Mozilla for more details and will update when we hear back although it’s not clear we will since t3n appears to indicated that Mozilla PR ended the interview after Beard started gabbing about a premium version Firefox.
Last year, Mozilla partnered with ProtonVPN to offer a small, randomized group of U.S. users the option to buy a subscription at $10 per month. At the time, Mozilla described it as part of a process to “explor[e] new, additional sources of revenue that align with [its] mission.” Talk of a premium-level Firefox seems to be a natural evolution from this experiment.
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.
