The other day I wanted to learn Svelte. Even though the tutorials on the Svelte homepage are great, I found the MDN Svelte tutorial to be better: it explains the conceptual differences wrt other frontend frameworks well, it explains in detail how to enable Typescript and migrate your projects, and it has a dedicated section that describes different deployment options.

While of - of course - all of these infos can be found somewhere on the web as well, I very much appreciate such a well-written, holistic intro to a framework. I signed up for the MDN Plus 5 plan.

P.S.: If someone from the MDN team is reading this, maybe include a "sign up" link directly in the blog article from Hermina.

It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers.

In practice, if you are not paying:

- Bookmarks can most certainly easily replace the Collections feature

- you can clone the MDN repository for having the documents offline

- notifications could be computed from the commit log

and the subscription probably makes these features more convenient, at least for the notifications and the offline without actually removing rights from anybody.

Seems clever.

Wait, so you mean to say I can pay $50 a year for high quality documentation that is eminently useful in my day to day work, and I get things like notifications when said content changes? And on top of that, I’ll be supporting free access to said content to those who might need it he most, like kids learning to program or rookies just starting their careers? AND it’s tax deductible? Pfft, shut up and take my moneys please!

I have no need for any of the stuff in the supporter plan but even at $100 a year this is a total bargain. I know I don’t have to pay for it, but with the amount of value I’ve gotten out of MDN over the years it’s a steAl. I’ll buy this as soon as am back at my laptop. I have no analytics to support it, but I swear !mdn is my most used DuckDuckGo shortcut. I’m signing up as soon as I’m back at my laptop.

MDN is literally the documentation for everything front-end web that is built-in to browsers and a little more. I hope all of the income from this goes back into MDN. If there's a project that deserves my eternal gratitude, MDN is up there as a web developer.

Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on MDN or contributed at any capacity.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed to personally organize parts of MDN but I might just subscribe to support the place. Who knows, maybe I’ll love the new features. Notifications could be helpful, though I’m more the “check in when I’m about to use some method to see if it’s changed” kind of engineer and less the “stay as up to date as possible” kind of engineer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.

This is an interesting take on documentation - mainly because I fail to see the value proposition in paying for the functionality provided.

Speaking from my own experience:

- Notifications. I am not sure that I've ever needed to know when a doc is updated, because if there is anything radical coming on the market (or in a spec proposal), there are other avenues to find out about it.

- Collections. That is already a functionality in the browser that is not locked into just one documentation site.

- Offline mode. There is Zeal[0] if you like client-side software and devdocs.io[1] if you like browser mode.

Combine all that with the fact that it's just for MDN, and the appeal kind of disappears. YMMV, of course.

[0]: https://zealdocs.org/

[1]: https://devdocs.io/

The long descriptive post ends with "We invite you to try the free trial version or sign up today for a subscription plan that’s right for you."

But... no sign up button.

Two of the internal links point to more info on features, which have a different menu at the top with a 'get mdn plus' button. I guess that's how you're supposed to get it?

Just surprised they felt the need to avoid putting a sign up link on the blog post. Yes, that's a bit rude, I know.

Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this?

In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.

MDN docs are the best... they should monetize via high level articles and example implementations for systems.

For example, the webRTC docs are great and explain a lot about how it works... however, there is very little information about good patterns for including it in your application. I bet people would be happy to pay for guides like that, I would.

Honestly, this is the kind of thing I like to see from Mozilla. Very straightforward, plus a way to support this valuable learning resource. I hope it generates some meaningful revenue!

> "In 2020 and 2021 we surveyed over 60,000 MDN users and learned that many of the respondents wanted a customized MDN experience. They wanted to organize MDN’s vast library in a way that worked for them."

in 2022, i really hate this "users told us" phrasing, because it's always misleading, and even normative at the margin. users didn't tell you anything, you inferred that from, here, a single survey (and that's more pretext than most provide). left to our own devices, users express feelings first and foremost, even if formulated reasonably. it's almost always ad hoc rationalization, because most users don't care enough to think deeply enough about your product in that moment of inquiry. you have to elicit and infer what they value, and there are plenty of quantitative (marketing) techniques these days to do so, but that takes real work and forethought.

this is one of those cargo-cult product (marketing) phrases i hear over and over, and it's naive at the very least. it's also how you get a product feature list that most people here (potential customers and customer advocates) seem to feel is lackluster and are even mocking.

with all that said, i find this offering at least closer to something i'd pay for than something like pocket or vpn. there are tons of value-added features that mozilla can offer on top of a browser and web dev that no one else would really want to tackle. they just need to do some real market research, rather than larp'ing it.

(i really should start a product blog just to catalog all these silly things.)

The only good offering here is available as part of the $10/month "Supporter" plan, a "direct feedback channel to the MDN team." The video describes that as "regular chats with MDN engineers."

Shockingly, this isn't even listed as a featured bullet on the plan list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus#subscribe The only bulleted advantages of paying $10/month are, "Early access to new features" and "Pride and joy."

As others have noted here, none of the "Plus" features are very useful: Collections, Notifications, and Offline support. Collections are just bookmarks, which all browsers do for free. Notifications are pointless, because all of the pages are on Github; you can subscribe to notifications there (but why would you even want to??). And I approximately never need to use MDN when I'm offline.

We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access 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 all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result.

EDIT: Buyer beware, I just signed up for the plan, and all it does is add a "Feedback" menu item that links to https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback … but that's a public repo. Anyone can file an issue there. I certainly did, and I'm not happy about it. https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/43

There's no Discord, no forum, no mailing list, no scheduled upcoming fireside chat… just a public Github repo where you can file an issue and hope for a response.

Dear MDN:

Congratulations on the launch. I hope that your best days are ahead.

Thanks, from the bottom of my cynical heart, for the thousands of times you've told me exactly what I needed to know.

Collections seems completely redundant when we have the ability to use favorites/bookmarks within our browser.

Unless i'm missing something that makes collections significantly different/better.

Mozilla ought to consider offering a bundle, at the moment they have several scattered offerings.

Mozilla VPN (Mullvad)

Firefox Relay

MDN Plus

Mozilla Pocket Premium

Any others?

Though I can see why it's currently scattered, it's not necessary that a VPN user cares about MDN or Pocket.

I'm curious how often people are needing offline access to documentation for web development.

If you want to support MDN, donate to OpenWebDocs.org. That supports open web content documentation on MDN for everybody.

Personally, I have the repo locally, so Plus isn't tempting. But if it adds something that is of value to you, giving money to mozilla isn't a waste I don't think. That said, Open Web Docs is a good investment. I think it's even tax deductible, but either way, it can be written off as a business expense.

I suppose offline access is nice. I think I'd rather pay for the ability to just download the whole site in some officially supported way. Priming a PWA baked into browser storage is a little roundabout. I want it to be grepable.

There is some space to earn money by providing "curriculum" for self-taught devs.

> Today, MDN Plus is available in the US and Canada. In the coming months, we will expand to other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

It is strange to see a list of countries which includes New Zealand but not Australia. I am wondering if there is some issue with making it available in Australia? (My first guess was Australia's GST on digital services, but it appears New Zealand has the same thing.)

Well written and updated documentation is hard to find these days, like the Arch Linux Wiki

I was sitting on the train yesterday, when I opened a tab with a page from MDN that was already loaded. It quickly jumped to 'cannot connect' even though I didn't refresh. I wondered why it did that, but it makes perfect sense now.

Now I use Zeal[1] to still have the documentation available offline.

[1]: https://zealdocs.org/

I like the idea! While I do not need these premium features I wanted to hit the "sign me up" button instantly just to support them. But then I found out that there's no such button and my country is not on going to be supported anytime soon.

And if MDN people are reading this: consider adding an "enterprise" option with centralized account management.

Nice, now can they finally stop taking money from Google? :)

"The new search deal will ensure Google remains the default search engine provider inside the Firefox browser until 2023 at an estimated price tag of around $400 million to $450 million per year."

"Mozilla's long-term plan is to build its own revenue streams from subscription-based services and reduce its dependence on the Google search deal" <-- I guess MDN Plus would be one of those subscription-based services!

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

Sailing is a long-time dream that I probably won't be able to realize in my lifetime. But, if I did ever go sailing, I would need something like parts of MDN downloaded. Doing computer work is what I love and I'm sure it's what I would use my spare time for. Clearly this has usefulness far beyond that niche case, but I love the idea that Mozilla has found a really useful thing to charge for. I hope that they can be successful with it.

> Collections: Find what you need fast with our new collections feature.

Collection is a feature we see in more an more knowledge sharing tools. Biggest user of that feature today is probably pinterest. The two usages that you can use them for is curation and quick retrieval. If you strip the collaborative part (curation) then YOU JUST reinvent bookmarks. Congrats mdn

All these features are available using other existing tools. This is just a nudge to donate to a worthy cause.

Subscribed. Would love if the $10/user/mo plan included shared collections for the entire team.

I think Mozilla should switch back to their old dinosaur mascot, it seems more relatable than ever.

Would be great if they had an enterprise level so i could get my work to buy this for us

There's a "Get MDN Plus" at the top of the MDN pages. Link: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus

I don't feel anyone should need to personally "donate" to MDN or feel compelled to out of some sense of moral obligation; or any other reason for that matter. This isn't a donation per-say, but many on here seem to not care one iota about the features but still express a sentiment to want to "donate"..

The major players make nigh uncountable sums of money from "the web". The major browser vendors have pretty much delegated documenting how to develop against the browser platform to MDN. Microsoft explicitly I believe? This entire endeavor should be funded by corp contributions IMHO.

This massive effort to monetize MDN through the "little guy" seems super strange to me. How 'bout some blog posts about how you plan to get Apple, Microsoft, and Google to foot the entire bill for the operation?

Why does everything need to be a subscription.

Sell me a product, like a JavaScript book or some merch.

Or just put up the donation link. I do want to give y'all money, but a recurring subscription is too much.

This is great! I'm glad to have a way to directly support MDN for the work that they do. MDN is by far the most valuable part of the work Mozilla puts out.

Nice features, it seems they actually found some useful things. I like the notifications.

Too bad it isn't available here yet, I will definitely sign up when I can.

what ever makes mdn sustainable going into the future

Why is it region-locked? I'm in Japan—looking at the English page—and the Plus page says it's not available in my region.

Remember when the stated goal of the shit load of money they got was to open knowledge to everyone?

Now they will do whatever to be a business!

Subscribed (to the Supporter plan @ annual)

Good to see them working on reasonable ways to monetize and support continued development and maintenance

That's all well but I actually preferred the previous style of the MDN Docs website.

I guess firing many staff didn't really save them a lot in the long run then.

Does anyone else dislike the recent redesign? Is there anyway to switch back?

Why doesn't MDN go the Stack Overflow route and allow people to ask questions and even answer them and curate it all?

I'd pay if I could get the old theme back.

This makes my soul hurt.

I would use this instead

- Devdocs

- Zeal on Linux and Windows

- Dash on mac

Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!

There's something in the water at Mozilla that negatively effects all product decisions.

Notifications and collections are features, not a product.

A viable and attractive MDN product would be a subscription to all the layers above the existing docs and guides, combined with a major initiative to connect with experts to create course material and sell it as a part of the platform.

MDN: what got you here won't get you where you want to go.

I wish they put some effort into making Firefox better.

To me, lately Firefox has been a pain in the ass to use. Regular silent updates that forces me to restart the browser and close all my work. Saving my session doesn't always help to continue working where it was interrupted.

The latest change to the downloads is horrible. Sometimes my work requires me to download hundreds of files that I only want to open with some software for several seconds, then dismiss it. Now instead of being able to open it directly from the browser, I have to watch how everything is saved in my downloads folder and then waste my time deleting all those files manually.

I'm not paying them any money. I don't want to waste my money only to see their executives getting richer without anything in return.

I don't need any of MDN plus's features. Just give me Firefox at $5/month without ads, pocket, sponsored news, telemtry, affiliate links and all the data collection.

What a cash grab

Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other

I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia

My early April Fools prank detector is going off. No?

How useful is this? I have never actually used it

Am I an outlier or does their head of product not really appear to have a bead on what developers actually want?