Comment by awesomekling
8 months ago
It depends on what you mean by “Mozilla’s fate”. In general, we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things simple and more sustainable financially. :)
Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort.
Are you planning on charging your users?
I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful.
Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.
We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.
You personally I believe without reservation about this, but the thing about creating a legal person is that it’s separate from you. Its control can—and in the long run, will—change hands. So please, please write this down somewhere, ideally somewhere binding on its future (can donations have conditions?).
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Despite that, I hope you'll consider a "pay what you can" popup when downloading the browser, or a donation button built into the browser settings page along with a one-time reminder, or something like that. I don't think that would be monetizing your users in any negative, extractive sense like ads do, it would still essentially just be a donation, just asked for in a more obvious way and made easy and convenient to do as part of using the app, instead of a vague separate thing that'll take work to find and that won't occur to most people to do. Personally I think charging users for software (as long as it is also FOSS) is totally fine, it's probably the only sustainable model for software that isn't ads or corporate sponsorship, and it actually serves to align the incentives of the software's developers more closely with users, instead of doing anything bad, but I respect that line.
I wish you luck, more competition in the browser space is sorely needed. But please, please spend more time thinking about your finances. The surface of planet "Startups That Will Figure Out A Business Model Later" is like 99.9% graveyard. You're going to be asking people to depend on your software for an extremely important part of their lives. If you don't have a path to sustainability, you're going to do a lot of harm when you close up shop.
Between the lack of a business plan and your responses about licensing, I'm afraid I feel you're coming at this from a naive point of view. This is a seriously important line of software you're entering, please do take some time to take it seriously.
Will watch your progress and again, I genuinely love to see your project. Good luck.
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Unless you are planning to live off the interest from your donations, how will this be possible?
With a simple two-part strategy:
1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.
2. We continue fundraising actively.
I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.
I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributions.
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