For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying

For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying for it. And I do front end dev professionally and also for fun so I guess I might be the "target market"? It will just end up like the news sites with a paywall - "oh the want me to pay <clicks back and goes to next search result while moaning about why Google even includes these paywall sites in results> I bet I am not alone - it is just a reference and any other site can cobble together some examples that 99% of visitors just want to copy-paste anyway so they can get back to their work or fix that weird error (e.g. w3schools) There are also questions in my mind about who would pay: the industry veteran who remembers the days before we had developer tools, or the person just starting out who doesn't really know anything yet? Or someone else? Neither the veteran or the newbie would get much value out of that $5 in my mind, leaving only a hollow rump of the middle-ground of people who care enough to pay for access, but also don't care enough to learn so that they won't actually need the subscription? It doesn't make sense. MDN will drop down the search rankings and some other site will provide reference material for DOM + JavaScript.