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MDN Plus

developer.mozilla.org

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Re: MDN Plus

#181

Post by steve_adams_86 »

HerminaC wrote: post #175
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fully alright with $5 - I saw $10 and immediately thought $5 would be reasonable. If any MDN folks are reading - $10 seems a bit too steep. Especially since this is in US $, it would seemingly put this service out of reach for a lot of people. Perhaps that’s not a concern to the foundation, but works against the principles of the open web in my mind.

We are indeed reading this feedback. And I get your point - thanks!

That’s awesome - I’ll keep my eye on pricing. I’d be glad to support you.

Re: MDN Plus

#182

Post by RheingoldRiver »

HerminaC wrote: post #175
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fully alright with $5 - I saw $10 and immediately thought $5 would be reasonable. If any MDN folks are reading - $10 seems a bit too steep. Especially since this is in US $, it would seemingly put this service out of reach for a lot of people. Perhaps that’s not a concern to the foundation, but works against the principles of the open web in my mind.

We are indeed reading this feedback. And I get your point - thanks!

Yeah, I have little interest in any of the listed services. But, I'd be happy to contribute a couple dollars a month to a "pay what you like to support us" tier. Either way I'll probably sign up if it's priced reasonably (or tiered), but imo it's definitely worth marketing "support MDN" prominently for this.

Two issues I found:

1) I had no idea there was a waitlist til I read another comment here; I wasn't going to expand the article, and the signup CTA is gated behind doing that 2) the signup button seems to do nothing? I even tried opening it in Chrome (Firefox is my primary browser)

Re: MDN Plus

#183

Post by [deleted] »

alphabravoB wrote: post #123
FriedrichN wrote: post #78

I wasn't totally against this until I discovered the A/B testing thing with the subscription costs. Something about that stinks. Just name your price and I'll think about it, don't be shady about it.

The price for every subscription you have was likely A/B tested. It's very standard and not shady. Subscription prices vary by all types of audiences for subscription-based models, test segments are just one of them, and one of the least shady in my opinion. It's a brand new product and they're gauging the right price.

[deleted]

Re: MDN Plus

#184

Post by ufmace »

jakub_g wrote: post #56

Obviously it would be nice if everything everywhere was always free, but docs and opensource suffer a lot from lack of sustainability when based on voluntary donations. Companies simply have no incentives to pay for anything. There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets.…

> Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.

More like this IMO. There tends to be a lot of process with this sort of thing, which makes me reluctant to bother. Especially if I'll have to do it over and over again.

Everyone's suggesting lower price levels, but I'd suggest they have a higher enterprise price level. I bet a lot of medium-large corporations would pay a few thousand a year for all of their employees to have access to this new top-tier MDN plus. Would probably have to support the usual rigamarole of corporate POs and billing and tools to administer accounts with large numbers of users.

Re: MDN Plus

#185

Post by ipsum2 »

terminalserver wrote: post #6

With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable. Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing. Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed…

Google has great web documentation, I still have this tab open from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27233019

Re: MDN Plus

#186

Post by efficax »

FriedrichN wrote: post #78

I wasn't totally against this until I discovered the A/B testing thing with the subscription costs. Something about that stinks. Just name your price and I'll think about it, don't be shady about it.

You want to find the price that fits the market. It's not shady, it's best practice!

Re: MDN Plus

#187

Post by ChrisArchitect »

If they're going to start collecting/producing high level tech articles/content, they should just start a magazine like Stripe's Increment Magazine, put effort into the look of it etc and ride the subscription method off that.

Re: MDN Plus

#188

Post by claytongulick »

Just for the purposes of N+1 feedback:

I agree with many other posters on here. I don't have much, if any, interest in the services mentioned, but I would happily sign up for $5/mo to support MDN which is the single most valuable dev resource I have available to me. At my experience level, much more useful that (for example) stackoverflow, which I rarely use.

Given that all of my income is indirectly derived from my ability to locate high quality documentation on HTML and JavaScript APIs, pitching in $5/mo would be a no-brainer for me to support the continued development of such high quality content without ads.

Re: MDN Plus

#189

Post by greatgib »

It looks like that it is the final straw to prove that Mozilla has completely lost its way...

For any startup or company it is normal to provide "premium" paid service and "advanced" content/knowledge to the subset of internet users that can afford it.

But ... this is the Mozilla foundation. Too much paid silicon valley executives transformed a structure dedicated to find funds to protect an "open internet" into a for profit structure that prostitute itself as much as needed to make money just for being profitable.

We saw it coming with Firefox evolution being neglected to instead waste money on numerous "outreachy" things.

Just for memo, here is one of the 10 points of the Mozilla manifesto:

"The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible"

Looks like that a "premium paywalled content website" will have a hard time pretending to be "open".

Re: MDN Plus

#190

Post by twic »

dfabulich wrote: post #133

MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically…

> We know how to do this "correctly."

Charge for the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" content?

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