4 ms·

Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up: * This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't

Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up: * This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there * Thunderbird is revenue positive, and this potentially gives that team another revenue stream to be even more self-sustaining through charging companies * Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best People on HN are fond of asserting that their own POV is the only one. Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for.

bakugo 6mo ago
> Thunderbird is revenue positive Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?
- godelski 6mo ago
  You think that just because the software can be downloaded for free means the developers shouldn't get paid for their work?
- rothific 6mo ago
  I think that wasn't phrased well- it's "revenue" positive meaning donation money covers more than the expenses
  - anildash 6mo ago
    That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.
    - rothific 6mo ago
      Fair point :)
tux3 6mo ago
>Thunderbird is revenue positive Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet? I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?
- abdullahkhalids 6mo ago
  Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline. I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group. You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1]. [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-25/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
  - tux3 6mo ago
    Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses. It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
  - badgersnake 6mo ago
    Wait what, they took donations to pay a team to build a mail client and had them build an AI thing instead? Or have I got that wrong.
    - ryanleesipes 6mo ago
      No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
    - badgersnake 6mo ago
      I don’t know why you’re downvoting, it’s a fair question based on the above comments.
LandoCalrissian 6mo ago
Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?
- Wolfrich 6mo ago
  it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
- eipi10_hn 6mo ago
  And?
  - bakugo 6mo ago
    And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that? Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
    - eipi10_hn 6mo ago
      Why do you know that nobody asks for? Are you in the team?
    - rothific 6mo ago
      Stop spreading misinformation, it's funded by grant money https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/faq.md https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
      - bakugo 6mo ago
        Ah yes, a grant from Mozilla, to Mozilla.
monooso 6mo ago
Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?
- tadfisher 6mo ago
  Thunderbird (the email client) was spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbolt is a new product from the MZLA Technologies team.
  - monooso 6mo ago
    TIL, thank you.
  - dotancohen 6mo ago
    > spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation I am a happy Thunderbird user. But when I see such reorganizing and deliberately confusing naming, I assume that there is somewhere intent to deceive.
afandian 6mo ago
It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation. (edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)
- glenstein 6mo ago
  It's certainly a feel good idea but the math doesn't math. Even a best case scenario donation drive would never be able to compete with search licensing revenue. Right now if you want to look at the best case scenario, it's probably wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest online donation drive that exists and they get 18% of the revenue that Mozilla gets from search licensing on approximately 4,400% more global traffic. And it's a mature campaign that's been an annual tradition for decades. I'd rather have the donation option than not have it but it has to be understood primarily as something that's just there to make users feel good. The reason they're structured the way they are is to access the search licensing revenue that gets them income they would never be able to get from just donation drives.
  - afandian 6mo ago
    I agree that switching over to an exclusively grassroots sponsorship level would be impossible. But there may be hybrid options available. Purely conjecture. Does the Google money come with some kind of funding non-compete? If not, why not open up other funding streams. If it does, that's worrying. The argument has always been "the org structure doesn't support donations" but the org structure is just a proxy for the intentions of the org.
CamouflagedKiwi 6mo ago
> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already. It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.
drzaiusx11 6mo ago
I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.
PaulHoule 6mo ago
It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited? If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave... but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us. We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk. They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location. Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one. I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.
- tjoff 6mo ago
  > Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.
440bx 6mo ago
Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.
zobzu 6mo ago
i find it interesting that they advertise it as "trusted because european"
dotancohen 6mo ago
> Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for. The "Announcing Thunderbolt" page actually makes this clear, the submitted URL does not. Maybe the submission should be changed to this URL instead: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt
WhitneyLand 6mo ago
What does “revenue positive” even mean? It doesn’t mean profitable, it doesn’t mean cash flow positive. Are you just trying to say their revenue is greater than zero?
pwdisswordfishq 6mo ago
> This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there I would rather have them work on Thunderbird.
BoredPositron 6mo ago
Hu... Revenue positive just last week that had a pretty dire sounding call for donations ala make sure thunderbird can survive...
andrewf 6mo ago
1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle 2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly. 3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients? EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead. [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

bakugo 6mo ago

> Thunderbird is revenue positive Is that why I'm met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird? Is this another Wikipedia situation?

godelski 6mo ago
You think that just because the software can be downloaded for free means the developers shouldn't get paid for their work?
rothific 6mo ago
I think that wasn't phrased well- it's "revenue" positive meaning donation money covers more than the expenses
- anildash 6mo ago
  That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.
  - rothific 6mo ago
    Fair point :)

tux3 6mo ago

>Thunderbird is revenue positive Hmm, I thought the for-profit Thunderbird pro hadn't launched yet? I know Thunderbird is for profit, but what are they profitting from without the paid service, and how much of that profit is going into this unrelated Thunderbolt AI platform, exactly?

abdullahkhalids 6mo ago
Thunderbird currently runs entirely on donations, even though they have paid products in the pipeline. I think a piece of software running on donations is not running off "charity". It's just a business model to not charge every user. Similar to how Twitch streamers operate, or my local theater group. You can read how they spent money in 2024 [1]. [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-25/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
- tux3 6mo ago
  Thanks, that's helpful. This says about ~70% of the money was paid to employees, ~10% infra costs, the other ~20% various other fees and smaller expenses. It would be interesting to have a breakdown of what part of the Thunderbird team is working on Thunderbird, Thunderbolt, or other forms of thunder.
- badgersnake 6mo ago
  Wait what, they took donations to pay a team to build a mail client and had them build an AI thing instead? Or have I got that wrong.
  - ryanleesipes 6mo ago
    No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.
  - badgersnake 6mo ago
    I don’t know why you’re downvoting, it’s a fair question based on the above comments.

LandoCalrissian 6mo ago

Thunderbird was literally asking for donations just a few days ago?

Wolfrich 6mo ago
it is a patreon style thing, they are donation funded. I think the poster is saying that they arent being frivolous with their money like some people have a bad taste about firefox
eipi10_hn 6mo ago
And?
- bakugo 6mo ago
  And they're taking money donated towards Thunderbird development and spending it on random unrelated AI slop ideas that nobody asked for. You really don't see anything wrong with that? Surely you can agree that when you open Thunderbird and are met with requests for donations, if you chose to donate, you'd expect that money to be invested in Thunderbird development, and not 10M Claude tokens to vibe code Mozilla's latest groundbreaking AI B2B SaaS idea?
  - eipi10_hn 6mo ago
    Why do you know that nobody asks for? Are you in the team?
  - rothific 6mo ago
    Stop spreading misinformation, it's funded by grant money https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/faq.md https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbolt/blob/main/docs/fa...
    - bakugo 6mo ago
      Ah yes, a grant from Mozilla, to Mozilla.

monooso 6mo ago

Just for clarity, you do mean Thunderbird (the email client), not Thunderbolt (this new AI client)?

tadfisher 6mo ago
Thunderbird (the email client) was spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbolt is a new product from the MZLA Technologies team.
- monooso 6mo ago
  TIL, thank you.
- dotancohen 6mo ago
  > spun off from Mozilla Corporation into a new for-profit company called MZLA Technologies. Both corps are still subsidiaries of the Mozilla Foundation I am a happy Thunderbird user. But when I see such reorganizing and deliberately confusing naming, I assume that there is somewhere intent to deceive.

afandian 6mo ago

It goes to show that Mozilla(s) could, if they really wanted, restructure Mozilla Corporation / Foundation. (edit - to allow users to fund Firefox, allowing us to better sleep at night, and to align our incentives)

glenstein 6mo ago
It's certainly a feel good idea but the math doesn't math. Even a best case scenario donation drive would never be able to compete with search licensing revenue. Right now if you want to look at the best case scenario, it's probably wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest online donation drive that exists and they get 18% of the revenue that Mozilla gets from search licensing on approximately 4,400% more global traffic. And it's a mature campaign that's been an annual tradition for decades. I'd rather have the donation option than not have it but it has to be understood primarily as something that's just there to make users feel good. The reason they're structured the way they are is to access the search licensing revenue that gets them income they would never be able to get from just donation drives.
- afandian 6mo ago
  I agree that switching over to an exclusively grassroots sponsorship level would be impossible. But there may be hybrid options available. Purely conjecture. Does the Google money come with some kind of funding non-compete? If not, why not open up other funding streams. If it does, that's worrying. The argument has always been "the org structure doesn't support donations" but the org structure is just a proxy for the intentions of the org.

CamouflagedKiwi 6mo ago

> Businesses definitely want to control the AI they're using (especially with RAGs of their own data) instead of just throwing it at their LLM vendor and hoping for the best Yes, agreed on that. I'm not sure I'm clear how this really helps that; I suppose it's a frontend that they don't have, but there are a bunch of those already. It doesn't seem to help them control the _actual_ AI, i.e. the model, which still has to come from somewhere.

drzaiusx11 6mo ago

I see no reason this product should exist even under the Thunderbird umbrella, especially if ANY resources under ANY Mozilla org were employed in this. This product is a distraction from their core mission in either case.

PaulHoule 6mo ago

It's a crazy crowded space. Any entry into this field looks like a "me too" product driven by FOMO instead of being motivated by (a) serving customer needs, (b) serving social needs, or (c) making money. (All of which are fine with me) It will get 0.5% market share -- and I'm supposed to get excited? If you lived in New York City you might think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast but there are not. If you are based in the Bay Area you see billboards that are very different from anywhere else. I'd say the viewpoint is a lot like this famous artwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave... but maybe instead of the rest of the US being 1/5 of the vertical space it is 1/25 of the vertical space. Problem is most customers do not live in the bay area and most web browser users do not live in the bay area and most web developers do not live in the bay area. Based in the Bay Area they can hop in their cars and drive the longest 40 miles in America to get to Google and Facebook's headquarters so Mozilla is talking to those people all the time and not talking to the rest of us. We don't get costly signalling to show they care about the rest of us, we don't even get cheap talk. They probably think René Girard is deep because they are surrounded by people who think René Girard is deep. If Mozilla wants to be relevant and not just an also-ran it needs to "think different" like the other 99.9% -- it's not that hard if you change your location. Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. Whether that is "fully fund Firefox" or "fully a fund a Firefox fork" or pick up another browser engine or start a new one. I see the warning lights flashing: a few years back web sites that didn't work with Firefox were few and far between, this weekend I bought tickets for a comic book convention and they took my money but didn't give me a ticket because the site didn't work with Firefox. I use Firefox as my daily driver so all the projects that I work on work with Firefox; the rest of my team doesn't give a damn and if you lose me another site will become Chrome-only.

tjoff 6mo ago
> Really the EU needs to apologize for those damned cookie popups and invest in a privacy-first browser. I love them. They are not mandatory, only shady websites that rather sell users information than providing a barely functional homepage. Yes the popups suck, but I'm very happy that this exposes the behavior and priorities of the industry.

440bx 6mo ago

Can the team please use that money on making thunderbird look like the nice UI mockups that were published that don't look anything like thunderbird.

zobzu 6mo ago

i find it interesting that they advertise it as "trusted because european"

dotancohen 6mo ago

> Imagine that there is such a thing as a person in charge of choosing technologies for organizations, and that you're such a person. That's who this is for. The "Announcing Thunderbolt" page actually makes this clear, the submitted URL does not. Maybe the submission should be changed to this URL instead: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt

WhitneyLand 6mo ago

What does “revenue positive” even mean? It doesn’t mean profitable, it doesn’t mean cash flow positive. Are you just trying to say their revenue is greater than zero?

pwdisswordfishq 6mo ago

> This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contention happening there I would rather have them work on Thunderbird.

BoredPositron 6mo ago

Hu... Revenue positive just last week that had a pretty dire sounding call for donations ala make sure thunderbird can survive...

andrewf 6mo ago

1. Potential donors get upset that they can't make directed donations to specifically support Firefox or Thunderbird rather than the whole kit-and-kaboodle 2. Separate entity spun up to focus on Thunderbird only. Now you can support Thunderbird development directly. 3. New separate entity is now in the business of extensible AI clients? EDIT: I went back and read the launch announcement [1]. I'll concede it does say "will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation" which could mean anything, really. And this development was funded by a Mozilla grant, importantly not by Thunderbird donors. I'm still struggling to not see this as a distraction from the core mission. I wish they'd spun up a new entity instead. [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/