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 now 7 team members employed by XWiki SAS, lead by David Benque, helped by the other departments of XWiki SAS including its CEO Ludovic Dubost. David Benque is our lead and lead designer, we have Yann our lead developer, 2 part time developers Daria and Diana, Fabrice our Crypto Researcher and Mathilde managing the CryptPad.fr instance and supporting our users.

XWiki SAS is an independent company based in France & Romania, building Open Source Collaboration & Knowledge management software for now 20 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 20 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"
You can learn more about the company in the FOSDEM Talk by our CEO "20 Years of Open Source building XWiki and CryptPad" which also contains information about CryptPad financing: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1830-20-years-of-open-source-building-xwiki-and-cryptpad/
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 enterprises 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 building software, we propose to participate to bringing the alternative encrypted solutions in the area of content collaboration and document editing. Being 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. We then decided during COVID to extend free storage on our instance to 1Gb. We have decided to keep this free usage which we would like to keep as much as possible, while still receiving funding through subscriptions or donations.

XWiki SAS has also applied and is continuing to apply to research grants for CryptPad. We have received multiple grants since then both from Europe and also from BPI France. You can find more information about these grants and our current budget in our latest finance status blog post ( https://blog.cryptpad.org/2024/03/08/CryptPad-Funding-Status-January-2024/ ).

Now, most of these grants are attached to doing specific improvements or integration needs for the enterprise, which have also extended the code base to maintain. They are also one time grants which we have to renew by applying for more projects. These grants are helpful and we thank all our funders, as without them we would not be where we are. However relying only on grants does not fully solve the sustainability issue.

Tobie Langel has summarized this problem very well in this slide of his presentation at #StateOfOpen (https://speaking.unlockopen.com/nBXJS5/1-billion-dollars-for-open-source-maintainers )

We believe that long term CryptPad needs to be sustainable directly from it's users with regular revenue. This should be through subscriptions on CryptPad.fr, donations for the project itself, or subscriptions from enterprise clients for on-premise or cloud installation, and less from grants.

At this point we still have a lot of work to push CryptPad as a solution in the enterprise, but for this, other investments are necessary, such allowing to have cloud deployment, enterprise authentication integrations (sso), or security audits to match the requirements of the users interested in advance security. While we pursue this approach through the BPI grant, we believe we cannot fully count on that path to sustain CryptPad to the level needed.

On the end-user or smaller companies side, who use CryptPad.fr, another instance or even deploy their own instance, we have many users. On CryptPad.fr we have monthly over 200000 unique visitors and 30000 regular users. There are additionally 1000 more installs of CryptPad around the world with their own users.

We are happy to have already 800 active subscribers and 910 (all time) donators, funding around 80KEuros for 2024.

These amounts, while very important and helpful, are still far from able to sustain the whole CryptPad team and/or allowing to expand the team, as the total spending for the team is over 600KEuros per year (More information on the funding status article: https://blog.cryptpad.org/2024/03/08/CryptPad-Funding-Status-January-2024/)

Now we believe it's possible to expand the support we get from all the users of CryptPad around the world, in order to increase this financing and better balance the funding from grants, giving us more medium term visibility.

We believe it would help significantly the project to reach 50% of revenue from subscription and donations at 300KEuros par year.

What we will use the money for:

The funds will allow us to focus more on the needs of individuals users of CryptPad, improving the apps, the security, the user experience, and also the overall maintenance of the code base. We will focus more on the reported github issues (https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad/issues) and possible, if the funding was able to be much higher, be able to work more on the scalabilty of the software allowing to handle more users on instances such as CryptPad.fr.