Chris Beard, CEO, Mozilla Corporation, in an interview with the German publication T3N about the intention to launch Firefox Premium (premium.firefox.com) this October, which will provide advanced services with a paid subscription. Details are not yet advertised, but as an example, services related to the use of VPN and online storage of user data are mentioned. Based on comments in the interview, some VPN traffic will be free, while a paid service will be offered to those who need additional bandwidth.
The provision of paid services will help finance the maintenance of resource-intensive infrastructures and will provide an opportunity to further diversify sources of income by reducing from the funds through contracts with search engines. Firefox's agreement to use Yahoo's default US search engine expires at the end of this year and it's not yet clear if it will be renewed, given Verizon's takeover of Yahoo.
Paid VPN testing in Firefox back in October of last year and is based on providing in-browser access via VPN service ProtonVPN, which was chosen due to the relatively high level of protection of the communication channel, the refusal to keep logs and the general focus not on making a profit, but on improving security and privacy on the Web. ProtonVPN is registered in Switzerland, which has strict privacy laws that prevent intelligence agencies from controlling information. ProtonVPN is not in the list of 9 VPN services that block in the Russian Federation due to unwillingness to connect to the registry of prohibited information (ProtonVPN has not yet received a request from Roskomnadzor, but the service initially stated that it ignores all such requests).
As for online storage, a start has been made within the framework of the service , to exchange files between users using end-to-end encryption. The service is currently completely free. The upload file size limit is set to 1 GB in anonymous mode and 2.5 GB when creating a registered account. By default, the file is deleted after the first download or after 24 hours have elapsed (file lifetime can be set from one hour to 7 days). Perhaps Firefox Send will introduce an additional tier for paid users with an extended limit on size and storage time.
Source: opennet.ru