To all Contributors and Subscribers to CryptPad,

It's been a ride in the last 4 month. As many, the Cryptpad team has been working from home and not getting out much. The COVID crisis has also had a significant effect on CryptPad.fr, with a flood of new users needing tools to work or study from home. To help with this transition we have also decided to increase the storage limit from 50Mb to 1Gb.

This has resulted in 3 times more unique visitors and 4 times the activity of the months leading up to April and May. Our team has been hard at work to handling the suddenly increased load on our servers along with a surge of new GitHub issues and support tickets. Around 150 new instances of CryptPad have also been installed around the world, bringing the total to more than 450 third-party instances.

We have also noted that during the COVID crisis, CryptPad has been heavily used by teachers for remote classes. We are very proud our tool is being used in this context. We have also decided to extend the 1GB storage limit for free storage by at least 3 months.

As you might also see on the graphs above, in June we have also seen significant growth of CryptPad usage in the USA, which we believe is linked to the ongoing protests calling for justice following the murder of George Floyd.

We've seen increasingly more people recommending the platform on social networks. We want to thank all our supporters for that have helped by spreading knowledge about our project. Personal recommendations like these contribute greatly towards normalizing the use of privacy-conscious tools like ours and motivating people to switch away from proprietary competitors. The more users we have, the easier it becomes to convince our backers of the value of financing CryptPad.

On the funding side, we're pleased to have been sponsored by new backers:

New European projects from NLnet and NGI Trust

At the end of last year and the beginning of 2020, we have requested additional funding from NLnet as well as NGI Trust. We have been happy to have had multiple projects accepted allowing us to have longer term funding for the team:

• After "CryptPad Teams" which we delivered in 2019, a second NLnet PET Zero Project "CryptPad for Communities" was awarded, with 50K Euros funding. Since January, we have been working to improve the Kanban, spreadsheet, and the rich text applications with many changes that the community was asking for. Many of the changes you have seen in our releases since the beginning of the year were funded by this project. Also as part of "CryptPad Teams" we had a security and an accessibility audit, allowing us to receive specialist feedback and do specific improvements in these areas.
• Our project "CryptPad SMC" (Secure Mobile Communication) has been accepted by NGI Trust, and we are just starting it with first meetings with our coaches. The goal of this project will be to launch a prototype Android application to ease mobile usage of CryptPad. We are still working on the exact plan for this. Stay tuned. This project has 75 Euros funding and will allow us to also evaluate how CryptPad competes in the mobile area.
• A third NLnet project was also awarded with 50K funding: "CryptPad Dialogue". We will not start this project right away as the team will be busy delivering the previous projects, but this is great news as it gives us longer term visibility on the funding of our team. We are assigning most of this funding to 2021. The goal of CryptPad Dialogue will be to implement new secure collaboration APIs for Poll and Form based data. This will allow an significant improvement and redesign of the Poll app and will open new possibilities.

Mozilla Open Source Support

Back in early February, during FOSDEM we (David & Ludovic) pitched the CryptPad project at the Open Source Speed dating event organized by the Mozilla Foundation, Indeed, Open Source Collective, Open Collective, and Simply Secure.

It was a great experience and we are glad to have been selected for an Open Source Seed Award of $10000 (9100 Euros). We are grateful that our project is being recognized. The funds will be used to help us improve the performance of CryptPad loading for the benefits of our users.

Beyond the funding itself, we are very happy to receive support from the Mozilla Foundation.

Many new subscribers of CryptPad.fr and donators on OpenCollective

As CryptPad.fr usage has grown in the last few month, we have also seen a rise in subscribers and donators. In 6 month we went from a total number of 242 subscribers and donators to 434 since the beginning. Out of these, the active subscribers count on CryptPad.fr is now 178, growing by 65%. The monthly donators is now 36 growing 95%.

The revenue from subscriptions and donations is now getting close to 2000 Euros / month.

This is very important for CryptPad, as we need to be able to fund this project independently in order to sustain it over the long term. So even if CryptPad manages to secure funding from outside sources such as NLnet, NGI Trust and the Mozilla Foundation, we do need our independent supporters.

We are happy the CryptPad is one of the top Open Source projects on Open Collective, next to very nice Open Source projects.

Come join these backers and help us grow Open Source privacy. You will find more information about the funding of the CryptPad project on our wiki.

Major improvements delivered in 2020

Throughout the beginning of the year, we have released regular improvements to CryptPad. Here are some of these improvements:

• Spreadsheet import / export in version 3.10 "Kouprey" and many spreadsheet improvements across many release, including being able to participate to a spreadsheet without a CryptPad account
• The implementation of safe links in version 3.11 "LabradorDuck" and access lists in version 3.13 "NorthernWhiteRhino" to introduce even more security
• History trim functionnality to reduce storage usage in version 3.12 "Megaloceros"
• Significant Kanban improvements, particularly in version 3.14 "OrienteCaveRat"
• Major performance improvements to handle 4x more load and admin panel improvements in version 3.15 "PigFootedBandicoot"
• Code pad "author colors" based on a pull request from the german PiratenPartei in version 3.16 "Quagga"
• Rich Text Comments in version 3.17 "RedGazelle" allowing to comment and send mentions to users
• Many usability improvements through many versions of CryptPad with the arrival of David in the team, in particular an important redesign in version 3.18 "Smilodon"
• Many stability fixes in version 3.19 "Thylacine"

This has been more than 10 releases with improvements and fixes in these last six month.

What's coming

With the projects in progress, the current roadmap is quite full, particularly with the CryptPad SMC project which will bring a Android prototype application.

As we have done in the last six months, we hope to continue releasing regular improvements to the core project.

We want to thank all our backers who make our work possible and motivate us to do more.

You can count on our team to continue to improve this project.