@jeffmcneill @alberto I've made this napkin calculation before, but let's go over this again:

Mozilla employs about 1000 people [1]. Let's just assume that they're all working on Firefox development and earn $100k annually. That gives us a personnel cost of $100M a year.

Meanwhile, up to 200M people still use Firefox [2] and the Google deal gives Mozilla an income of around $500M annually (although this income varies) [3].

Knowing that personnel costs are the biggest cost of any company, I honestly don't know how Mozilla is running out of money... But let's assume the Google deal disappears and Mozilla need to get money from somewhere else. Could it live off its userbase?

I think they very well could. Even if we assume a $1 net donation to Mozilla per user per month, we would only need around 9 million donators to cover the personnel costs, or ~5% of the userbase. It's a general rule of thumb of donations that you can expect 5% of your followers to be willing to donate, so I don't think this is far fetched.

I *am* worrying about that apparent ~400M that Mozilla is spending ... somewhere that is not on their own people. But yeah, if they wanted to, Mozilla could be carried by their userbase and, more importantly, be inclined to what their users are telling them.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/working-on-distributed-teams/
[2] https://tinygrab.com/how-many-people-use-firefox/
[3] https://www.techspot.com/news/101083-mozilla-raked-almost-600-million-2022-thanks-google.html