With the start of 2026, it is time for another update on the funding of the CryptPad project, following the status we did last year.

What happened with CryptPad's funding in 2025

You can see in this table the details of the funding of the CryptPad project we expected for 2025, and what really happened.

Note 1: A change of French law in early 2025 made us lose a benefit for "Young PhD employees" where the state was giving us an extra subsidy for a PhD in their first two years. For CryptPad, this extra subsidy was supposed to last until end of October 2025, but was stopped mid-February 2025, impacting our revenue by 37K Euros.

On the spending side, we expected and did the following:

Note 1: We have made small adjustment to the data from prior years as our budget estimations got better.

Note 2: We are not including contributions from other XWiki SAS teams in the salary costs, these include: marketing, infrastructure, and our CEO. Human resources and a small part of the hosting of CryptPad.fr are included under "Other costs".

And the following balance:

Note: Overall, we are close to the balance, and we have balanced CryptPad's funding.

The key point of this year is that we have a significant growth of the client revenue:

• CryptPad.fr subscriptions: +60% to 121k Euros
• Donations: +80% to 29k Euros
• CryptPad Enterprise and Cloud: +30% to 41.5k Euros
• All client revenue: +53% to 191.5k Euros

Client recurring revenue in 2025 has reached 30% of our financial resources, compared to 17% in 2024. This is great progress for the project, especially as we unexpectedly lost 37k Euros due to a change of the French tax law for 2025.

At the end of 2025, we have reached 1,540 paying accounts (versus less than 1,000 last year). This makes the flagship instance the main source of client revenue for the project, and also the one that has the most potential to grow in the next few years. In January, we had 143 new subscribers to CryptPad.fr, which is a record.

On the donation side, we have also seen progress, with 80% more donations, reaching 29k Euros. While this is not yet enough to sustain the project, it does matter a lot and contributes to the financial capacity of the project. We now have 150 monthly or yearly donators and 334 one-time donators in 2025.

Overall this means more than 2,000 people supporting us in 2025, coming from all around the world. We have seen in 2025 a significant growth of revenue coming from the United States, reaching now more than 50% of new subscriptions coming from the United States.

Thank you to all of our supporters. This continued help is key for the team, especially to insure future sustainability of the project.

CryptPad sustainability

This year, we have reached 30% of our funding and spending that is coming from recurrent client revenue which is the most sustainable part of our revenue from one year to another. We also have some French state research subsidy (CIR) which we consider sustainable also for the years to come representing around 20%.

This means that overall we are at about 50% of our revenue that can be relied on from one year to another. For the remainder of our budget we have less visibility. However, we have been successful at finding projects that can continue to fund CryptPad: in the last years we have had the chance to be supported by NGI/NLNet projects and now this January, we have received the news that the ELFA project, which is a collaboration with NextGraph, BlockNote, and others, has been accepted, bringing us some additional funding for 3 years.

However, this does not yet make us fully sustainable in future years. Additionally, if we want to invest more in CryptPad, we will need to continue to grow our funding. Tackling Big Tech is tough with a budget of 600k and a staff of only 9 people.

In order to sustain and grow the project, we have estimated that the most achievable strategy is to focus on both CryptPad.fr subscriptions and on donations. Also, in order to make up for the expiring funding in the future, we need to quadruple these subscriptions and donations over the next 2 to 3 years.

2026 funding & budget

On the revenue side, we expect the following:

We have included both the 2026 and 2027 estimates, as there is a big difference with the end of a French research funding in 2027. Fortunately, the ELFA project has been accepted and will help us get close to balance.

On the spending side, we plan the following:

Note: We are not including contributions from other XWiki SAS teams in the salary costs, these include: marketing, infrastructure and our CEO. Human resources and a small part of the hosting of CryptPad.fr are included under "Other costs".

And the following balance:

With the current team and projected revenues, even with expected growth that would double revenue within 2 years, we are not yet able to fully fund the team without additional research project funding.

We estimate that we would need to reach 400k of subscriptions and donations in 2027 to balance the spending. It would be nice to achieve this by then, but depends on the success of CryptPad.fr and exceeds the growth rates we are currently seeing.

We will look at additional possibilities to both grow the client revenue, and receive additional research funding, in order to be able to grow the team and extend our ambition.

What we did in 2025 with our funding and plan for 2026

Our funders deserve to know what we have done with their support.

The best way to see all the work is to check the recap blog post prepared by our team which lists many of the achievements of the team during the year.

It is also possible to view the blog articles under the status-update tag, and also check the recent FOSDEM presentation which shows a review of 2025.

In addition to the work on the CryptPad software we have also maintained CryptPad.fr which is the main sustainable source of funding for the team and has seen more than 50% growth in 2025.

Here are some statistics of usage of the CryptPad.fr instance. Note that based on IP addresses we are able to have a source "country" for our users, knowing that this data can be wrong. Additionally the usage of Unique IP to identify number of users, is also subject to biases as a user can change IP address during the month and multiple users can share the same IP address. Also we remove the last digits of IP addresses. These statistics also show what "metadata" a CryptPad server can record.

Below you can see the metrics of January 2026 which as shown in the graph below is bringing a new spike of usage, especially coming from the United States

These statistics show that CryptPad.fr has grown more than 50% during the year, consistent with the number of subscribers.

In January more than 10,000 users registered on CryptPad.fr, 3M pads have been opened from 367k internet addresses and 142k IPs have seen a CryptPad Form.

Also, as we have opened Office compatible docs for free on CryptPad.fr, these docs have joined sheets and rich text pads and forms to a similar usage level.

Also CryptPad installations have almost doubled from 1,100 to 2,000 in one year.

Our 2026 plan

As the statistics of CryptPad.fr are showing, we are experiencing a high growth of CryptPad.fr. Also, for the sustainability of the CryptPad project, CryptPad.fr is currently crucial for the regular funding of the project, outside of research projects. Our performance analysis also show that we have reached a wall in terms of performance optimization we can do on the current architecture of the server. We currently already have some hours (5pm–7pm) of very high load, during which our server struggles to server our users. This is why we have started last year to work on the CryptPad Scalable Server, for which we have also received NGI/NLNet's financial help.

Our key objective for the first semester of 2026, is to finish the delivery of the Scalable Server and deploy it on CryptPad.fr, and later also provide it as part of the standard CryptPad package.

We won't stop other developments which we detail below in the summary of the activities for 2026:

• CryptPad Scalable Server, funded by NLNet (first semester 2026) and CryptPad.fr upgrade to the Scalable Server
• CryptPad Notes, funded by NLNet (Starting April 2026)
• OnlyOffice module, CryptPad embedding API funded by BPI France
• ELFA (Starting during the second semester 2026), funded by the European Community as part of Open Internet Stack. This will supplement the CryptPad Notes funding.
• UI / UX and mobile Improvements

Besides the development activities, we also need to do:

• CryptPad.fr infrastructure maintenance
• Support of our users (paying users and free users, as a best effort)
• Deal with technical debt and maintenance of the code base, including end of life dependency, regular refactoring for modularization
• Maintenance and regular upgrade of the CryptPad Cloud offering
• Marketing activities to make the project known
  • Regular communications online
  • Presentation at open-source events
  • Website improvements to present CryptPad (First quarter of 2026)
• Improvements to our subscription and donations process to increase our funding

For the last item, we are considering implementing some donation buckets for specific areas of development. At FOSDEM, we were encouraged to try a different approach to donations. Instead of a single campaign, we could run separate crowdfunding efforts for specific areas like accessibility, mobile improvements, or UI/UX. Based on the donations for each one, we'd commit to investing more in those areas. At this point, we're not sure this approach would work. We're already trying to invest in these areas, and the current level of donations (around €30k for 2025) hasn't been high enough so far to clearly fund one area over another. If our users follow us with this, they can specifically promote our donation boxes to help grow the donations to CryptPad for an area of development that they believe is really important.

We want to emphasize that we still consider these areas essential. However, it's been difficult to focus more on them while also delivering on the funding we’ve already received. Finally, we are also planning to look for specific funding for the areas where our users are asking for the most improvements.

We want again to thank all our subscribers, donators and also users. We are proud that CryptPad can contribute to spreading open source privacy protecting solutions, which are more than needed in today's world. Having now more than 2,500 financial supporters, 2,000 installs and hundreds of thousands of users on CryptPad.fr motivates us in this challenge.