We are excited to announce that we approved a new budget at the FOSDEM 2025 hackathon for this year, which will not only allow us to keep the infrastructure lights on and finance these incredibly productive hackathons. But also actively drive development forward in critical areas throughout the year. We have been dipping our toes into that in 2024 with paid work for upstreaming systemd patches, but thanks to our amazing donators we plan to not only continue that but also felt confident enough to also spend a significant chunk of money on building our upcoming hardware CI system (and related software components) for improving the reliability of postmarketOS. More on that further below, first a definition of our timeframes and a recap of 2024.
Timeframes
Discussing financial information without clear timeframes can often become confusing. During the previous blog post we took a timeframe between the time we started collecting donations (December 2023), and the first finished month before writing it (July 2024). Even though that was fitting as our first discussion into financials, economics for organizations are often better discussed for a period of a complete year. As the postmarketOS team assembles regularly every FOSDEM, we have found fitting to use February as a cutting point. In the following, our budget and financial discussion will consider a period starting every February, and finish in January of the next year. We will refer to this period as "financial year", with financial year 2025 compromising the time between February 2025 and January 2026, both inclusive. To be able to compare values and do assessments, we will take financial year 2024 as the same period for the previous year. Therefore, here we will not discuss December 2023 and January 2024. We consider those two months to be outliers due to the start of the donation period, and they have been sufficiently covered in our previous update.
Financial year 2024: a recap
All data in this section is based the raw transactions data publicly available from Open Collective. If you look into it and find any mistake, feel free to let us know in any possible way. Be it Mastodon, our Matrix rooms, or by email.
Income
During this year, postmarketOS received a total of €12656 in donations, with €8484 in recurrent income, and €4172 in one-time donations. This provides an average slightly above €1000 per month. However, we saw a clear increase between the first 6 months (average €729), and the second 6 months (average €1380). These numbers are skewed by a single one-time €1000 donation in August, and by the majority of our yearly-recurrent donations being charged in December. Still, it is a sign that we can plan ahead with less fear of running dry in the future.
It is also important to note that we paid 11.71% (close to what we observed in the last blog post) of this income in fiscal and transaction fees. So out of the €12656, in total €11175 made it into our bank account.
Expenses
In total, we spent €3799 including fiscal hosting, or €2317 without it. Most of it: €1805, the 77% without fiscal hosting costs, went into infrastructure. From them nearly €1000 was a one-time-donation to OSUOSL, the entity that kindly hosts our gitlab! We are committed to, every year, spend some amount of donations into supporting organizations critical to our project, and that donation can be considered part of it (this year, we already donated €1000 to Alpine!).
A small amount of money (€200) went into buying a table cloth for events, and some hardware (€76) for development. We also spent a little bit of money on the FOSDEM hackathon (€235) in 2024's financial year. However, most of the expenses for it (€1149) got allocated to January 2024, and therefore are not included in here.
We would have liked to also pay for some projects. Indeed, there is a €500 invoice pending payment in our fiscal host, Open Collective Europe, from work done for the systemd musl patches upstreaming project. Unfortunately, we bumped into tax requirements that we were not ready to handle, and the payment got considerably delayed. We are in the process of resolving this and it has been a valuable lesson for us. Moving forward, we will know how to deal with these situations, and getting paid work done from donations should be a smooth process.
Balance
Overall, during financial year 2024 we added €8857 to our balance. Most importantly, our running costs remain considerably below our recurrent expenses, which puts us in a great financial position. We are also more ready to tackle expending money in projects, which will be beneficial in the following year.
Financial year 2025
With all this input from the previous year, and the experience of running on donations for a little bit longer, we have enough information to be able to plan ahead with some accuracy. Therefore, for 2025 we want things to look a bit different. We plan to spend some of our reserves on projects that bring value to postmarketOS and the Linux Mobile community. This comes as a consequence of several factors:
- We got our basic running costs (infrastructure and FOSDEM Hackathon) well covered by our recurring income. This means that, at any time, we could roll back to minimum spending without risk to the project. Even without reserves!
- We think it is a better use for donations to end up in software improvements than to just idle in our bank account. We want to provide value with that money. Spending a significant amount in meaningful projects is the best way to do it.
- We have a significant reserve relative to our expenditures. Without spending money in projects, we could run out of our savings for a timeframe well above 5 years. At which point economic predictions become more wild guesses than accurate estimations.
The budget
At this point, you might have already guessed, for the next year, our goal is to run a strongly deficitiary budget. We want to see our reserve reduced by spending it in meaningful projects, while leaving room to learnings to be implemented in follow-up years. At the same time, we want to keep our running costs below our recurrent expenses, so in case of emergency we can always cut down on projects and keep the project afloat.
Entries
Therefore, our budget has the following entries:
- Income (total €12948) includes:
- €11580 in recurrent donations. At a rate of €965 per month, similar to what we saw in the last months of 2024. This is a conservative estimate that plans for no growth.
- €1368 in one-time donations. At a rate of €114 per month. This is close to the lowest values we got every month, and was considered due to these donations having a very strong and unpredictable variation.
- Expenses (total €27785) includes:
- €1553 in fiscal hosting fees, equivalent to roughly the 12% we saw last year.
- €2032 in infrastructure costs consisting of:
- €1032 in running costs, which is 20% more than we saw last year to account for some increase.
- €1000 in a one-time donation similarly to the OSUOSL donation.
- €500 in marketing costs. These include €200 for stickers and other fungible items for conferences, and €300 in other "assets" like an additional table cloth or phone stands for tables in conferences.
- €2900 for FOSDEM and post-hackathon expenses, which was heavily influenced by accommodation costs being known in advance.
- €300 for support for other hackathons or conferences where multiple members of the team might join.
- €17000 to support building a Hardware CI system that can help improve the reliability of the lower layers of our stack and close-to-mainline kernels. Some of this work has already started, and a more comprehensive update will follow. This is the greatest difference from last years, and comes due to us considering the reliability of postmarketOS a top-priority.
- €3000 for systemd-related upstreaming work. To move forward with musl support and similar tasks. A small part of this (€500) is a carry-over from work executed in 2024.
Summary
Overall, we are looking for a budget with a negative result of €14873. With it, at the end of fiscal year 2025 we will have €32586 in reserve, which would keep a budget without projects and without income running for close to 5 years. In addition to it, the budget still has a positive result on recurrent income and expenses. If we consider recurrent expenses to be: infrastructure, FOSDEM, and stickers, we get a positive "recurrent result" of €6448. So the core is still positive, lowering the financial risk even further.
Please let us know if you have any comments or input, so we can improve in the execution and planning in following years, or even amend the current budget if considerable issues are raised. We very much welcome input from people with a greater expertise in finances and communication, so we can build better budgets, and better communicate them to our community.
A huge thanks to everybody who is making this possible! ❤️ And see you in the next year's update!
If you appreciate the transparency of our finances and the work we are doing with postmarketOS, consider joining our OpenCollective!