MDN Plus

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.

Who is left on the team that can help paying folks work through web related questions? As I understand it the MDN team only exists to manage user contributed content. So you can book a call to talk to some project managers about how they convince people to give free content I guess?

Or put another way, why wouldn't you just pay money directly to the content creators who are putting stuff on MDN? These are likely the folks making patreons, paid courses, etc. and are the subject matter experts you'd want to engage.

I can imagine notifications being useful if you’re waiting for a browser to add a feature or something

While we all are allowed to have our own reasons for signing up, my reason had exactly nothing to do with unlocking magical paywalled features and everything to do with putting my money where my mouth is to support this incredible resource.

I have personally derived massive value (time, money, effort) from MDN and will do anything I can to help ensure it outlives me and my petty interests.