Comment by aorth
I've been paying for Relay for years. I use it all the time. It's great!
I use Firefox out of principle, and might pay or donate to it if I felt Mozilla was the same organization that it was when it fought for the open, standards-based web. The handful of missteps along the way haven't increased user trust.
I had been donating to Thunderbird for a few years until I recently realized they paid $4,000 to be a silver sponsor at SCALE 22 https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/sponsor/thunderbird. I was under the assumption they needed money for developers.
I've never heard of this conference, but is it possible that the Thunderbird team considers $4,000 for a booth there to be a positive ROI for recruitment and/or general outreach?