With the start of the new year it is time for another update on the funding of the CryptPad project. A lot has happened since this time last year, so we are coming back with more information on how the project is going.

Expectations for 2023

Last year we gave three possible evolution for the 2023 revenue compare to the 2022 budget depending on the funding we would have been able to secure:

This all depended on the evolution of two large projects. One being the German State project, "Sovereign Workplace Project" in which CryptPad is participating and the French "Sovereign Collaborative Cloud" project which we expected to sign at the beginning of the year. We know that in any case we believe we would be able to grow the team.

What happened in 2023

What actually happened is that the "Sovereign Workplace project" went as planned, keeping us quite busy during the year, with the release of the Diagram application and a lot of work on accessibility and security. On the French project side, we started later than planned with the different project starting around the mid-year, reducing a little the budget for 2023. Now these projects have started and we are actively working on them.

Also in October we were happy to hire Fabrice Mouhartem, a Cryptography Engineer who qualifies for the young PhD status, allowing us to have 2 years of funding from the French state under the CIR Young PhD program.

From a financial point of view here are the financial resources we have been able to count on for 2023:

Some donations received in bitcoin have increased value during 2023. We sold them now and retrieved them from bitcoin exchanges with a win of 12k.

As you can see this is slightly lower than the "mid level" we expected from 2023. This is due to the research project starting later than planned. This is however more than doubling our budget from 2022 which allowed us to increase the size of the team during the year.

On the spending side:

2023 Financial Status

From the financial point of view the year of 2023, after doubling the size of the team and our spending, the budget has a small negative of -15K. Also we haven't recovered the negative €50k of 2022.

In 2023 we wanted to start selling CryptPad support or cloud services to organizations, and on this part we are running later than planned, although interest has been picking up in this area in the last few weeks. We have had delays to deliver an automated Cloud service and also SSO features which are necessary to propose CryptPad to companies. Also while we have a little increase in subscriptions for "cryptpad.fr" and donations (around 35% from 2022), these represent only 13% of our revenue.

This makes us increasingly dependent from research projects and client roadmap funding, as you can see below with the 2024 budget. This has a tendency to direct our roadmap to more complex work which is not always the one that is the most requested by our individual users. This is also risky on the longer term as we risk not being able to maintain the same team size on CryptPad if we don't find more projects or funding.

While we hope to be able to create recurrent revenue with enterprise clients in 2024,  you can help make CryptPad more sustainable by helping us increase subscriptions and donations. To subscribe to cryptpad.fr, visit https://cryptpad.fr/accounts/ and to donate on Open Collective visit https://opencollective.com/cryptpad

What did we do in 2023 with our funding

You can find all the statuses of the Year 2023 on our blog in the status-update section:

https://blog.cryptpad.org/tags/status-update/

In particular in 2023 we have worked on the following:

• We almost finished the work on the NLNet BluePrints project funded by NGI Entrust, publishing the security white paper of CryptPad: https://blog.cryptpad.org/2023/02/02/Whitepaper/
• We delivered a new Diagram application based on draw.io: https://blog.cryptpad.org/2023/08/18/status-2023-summer-02/, funded by the Sovereign Workplace Project from the German Government. Through this project we have also delivered a NextCloud integration: https://blog.cryptpad.org/2023/12/01/status-2023-11/
• As part also of the German Government project, there has been a lot of work on security and accessibility. Since this summer we have fixed many accessibility issues https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad/issues?q=label%3AAccessibility+is%3Aclosed and also setup accessibility tests and more general integration tests.
• We also worked on 2FA and SSO as part of the NLNet CryptPad Auth project funded by the NGI Assure program. This allowed is to deliver the CryptPad SSO plugin https://github.com/cryptpad/sso and also the 2FA functionality available since 5.4.0 this summer.
• There has been also many bug fixes and improvements, with more than 1296 commits in the core repository but also other repositories such as sso, nextcloud-open-in-cryptpad, helm and our onlyoffice repositories: https://github.com/cryptpad/

2024 Funding & Budget

Last year, we were waiting for the finalization of the French BPI projects which were finally signed in the mid-year. XWiki SAS has been happy to be part of the three projects selected (https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/France-2030-funding-XWiki-and-CryptPad/).

Thanks to these projects we have funding for the next 3 years for the CryptPad project which allows to have a basis for the team, however we also have a lot of engagement of things to work on. The funding is very much directed towards the integration APIs and the OnlyOffice integration in the project.

Also CryptPad was selected to join the German "Sovereign Workplace" project, now called openDesk (https://xwiki.com/en/Blog/XWiki-joins-OpenDesk/). During 2023 we have received significant funding, in particular for the Diagram application, the NextCloud integration, but also security and accessibility. For 2024, however we don't know if we'll get funding. The project is currently more in deployment mode and also in transition to the ZenDis organization (Zentrum Digitale Soveränität).

We also hope to be able to receive more funding through the "CryptPad Cloud" offer and also through CryptPad support contracts. If you are a company, education institution or any organization and wish to run your own CryptPad instance, check our cloud offering and also our support offering at https://cryptpad.org/use-case/enterprise/. Subscribing to these offers will help the CryptPad project improve.

Expected funding for 2024

You can see in this table the details of the funding of the CryptPad project we expect for 2024:

We have guaranteed funding from the French BPI project for 2024, regular subscriptions and donations and also CIR Tax cuts. This brings us 513k of guaranteed revenue. We can then expect from 50 to 150k of funding of our roadmap from the Sovereign Workplace project and from 0 to 100k of client revenue for CryptPad Cloud and Support.

On the spending side we expect the following:

We would like to hire during 2024 as we also see new contracts coming in.

And the following balance:

What does it mean for CryptPad

Last year we have hired in order to prepare for larger projects. We doubled the team's size, hiring 5 people of which one did not stay. While we have not fully balanced the budget we have made the right choice, as 2024 is now looking good and we are already balancing the budget. This is thanks to the long 4 year French BPI project which gives us visibility. We also hope that thanks to the German Sovereign Workplace project and also new sales on CryptPad Cloud and also support contracts we can increase this budget and continue to hire.

This also means we will hope to have new hires during the year. If the CryptPad project is something that matters to you, contact us. We don't yet have job posting up at  https://cryptpad.org/jobs/ but check our fediverse account for news on this during the year.

You can also help CryptPad grow faster and be more sustainable

On the cash flow side, XWiki SAS has also done good sales and is able to cover the short term needs, though given the growth of both XWiki and CryptPad, we do expect that it won't be easy to hire as fast as we would like. This is why, although we do have projects coming up, the help of our community is more than welcome.

Beyond the need of cash to hire faster, it is still important to bring additional, independent funding to CryptPad through cryptpad.fr subscriptions or through regular (monthly or yearly) donations or through enterprise clients, as this would increase recurrent revenue which is needed.

For CryptPad to be less dependent on short or medium term projects, the recurrent funding for the maintenance of the core software is essential.

Our users, paying users and donors are our credibility. When we discuss with potential customers or project partners, each user is key, each instance being installed, each pad being opened, each mention of CryptPad. You are our credibility.

We'd like to thank all of you and encourage anyone to join them on cryptpad.fr or opencollective.

If you want to know more about how at XWiki SAS we area approaching the financing of Free and Open Source software you can watch the FOSDEM presentation that I did this year: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1830-20-years-of-open-source-building-xwiki-and-cryptpad/. It includes a lot of information about XWiki but also financial information about CryptPad. This can give you a better overview of the challlenge but also pleasure of building a company contribution Free and Open Source software.