CryptPad is an encrypted drive & collaborative editor, the server (and server operator) cannot read the documents that you're working on.
What is CryptPad and how was it created
The CryptPad project has been created as part of a Research Grant of XWiki SAS from BPI France, where XWiki SAS was working on realtime editing for the XWiki software. The
ChainPad technology developed by the CryptPad creator and ex-XWiki employee Caleb James De Lisle, allowed the realtime algorithms to encrypt the data and make the actual data unknown from the server. This allowed for the creation of CryptPad which demonstrated that encrypted realtime collaboration was possible without the server knowing what you are typing.
Who we are
The "CryptPad Squad" is a team of 2 full-time developers and 1 designer employed by XWiki SAS, lead by Aaron Mc-Sween, helped by the other departments of XWiki SAS including its CEO
Ludovic Dubost.
XWiki SAS is an independent company based in France & Romania, building Open Source Collaboration & Knowledge management software for 15 years.
The goal of XWiki SAS is to bring the CryptPad software and service to sustainability in order to be able to continue and accelerate its development. XWiki SAS is committed to Open-Source software.
Why trust us ?
- We've been developping Open Source for 15 years, not a newcomer with no track record.
- XWiki SAS has been recognized in France at the Paris Open Source Summit 2019 with the prize "Company prize for open and ethical technology"
- We have real software, not a promise !
Our Goal
We believe that the current business model of the Web is broken towards the
"surveillance capitalism" and that the evolution towards cloud software represents massive privacy and security risks.
We believe new encryption-based solutions are needed.
While building self-hostable Open-Source software is a necessary approach to mitigate these problems, we believe it is necessary to go further and introduce encryption in all the services and software. You should not need to trust your providers and your own self-hosting skills, but the technology and encryption put in place, should help as much as possible to guarantee your privacy and your security. While an ambitious and difficult task, we believe it is feasible.
Our ambition is to make an encryption-based alternative to collaboration tools that are insecure and share your information with the server and with advertisement systems. These alternatives should bring privacy and security at the core of the software. We believe these alternatives should be free software which can be audited and reused widely and should bring back trust towards cloud services and software.
It is a very ambitious task as there are many collaboration tools used daily by individuals and entreprises and they are highly used to these tools. Many Open-Source and non Open-source developers and companies are actively working on other projects for email services, secure storage solutions, social networks and many others solutions will be needed.
XWiki SAS being a specialist in collaboration and editing software, we propose to participate to bringing the alternative encrypted solutions in the area of content collaboration and document editing. Being an Free Software activists and believers, we will do all this development as Open-Source.
Why an Open-Collective
The BPI France research grant which funded the initial CryptPad research & development and service ended in April 2019. In order to continue the development, XWiki SAS had to lay out a strategy to sustain it long term. In 2017, the team has put in place subscriptions to go beyond 50Mb of storage on the CryptPad.fr service and in 2018 the CryptPad OpenCollective in order to receive donations. XWiki SAS has also applied and is continuing to apply to research grants for CryptPad and in June 2019, we received a 50kEuros grant for implementing "Teams features" in CryptPad.
We believe that long term CryptPad can be sustainable through subscriptions and donations but to get there we need time and a more complete and usable solution, as well as more popularity all around the world. CryptPad.fr has currently (in June 2019) 20000 visitors a week and there are 250+ community instances of the CryptPad software. The current revenue of subscriptions and donations since we started has been 7kEuros (3k donations and 4k subscriptions). At the current rate, we expect around 4k additional subscription and donations for the year.
For the year 2019, given the salary costs of the 2 full-time developers and our summer interna, as well as other costs of running CryptPad.fr, we still need 20KEuros of funding for year 2019 and more funding would be needed to accelerate the CryptPad development and as well manage the CryptPad.fr instance.
This OpenCollective is there for that and we hope you can participate to help us improve privacy and security and develop CryptPad.
What we need the money for
The funds will be used to complete the funding we received from NLNet NGI Zero PET fund, and contribute to the maintenance, scalability and usability of the CryptPad software and service. Once we exceed the current 2019 budget and have visibility on the 2020 budget depending on additional Grant requests, the donations will be assigned to maintenance or to new features and possibly new hires in the team. We commit to report regularly on our progress and publish our budget including revenue and spending of the CryptPad software and service. We started to publish part of the financial aspects on our
Wiki