Open Collective
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Funding News February 2020
Published on February 6, 2020 by Ludovic Dubost

Hi Contributors and Subscribers to CryptPad,

The last four months have been very active.

First, the biggest news: we have been awarded a second NLNet NGI Zero PET grant of 50KEuros. This is obviously big news as it allows us to close our 2019 budget (we were still missing 25k) and we will start the year on a highly positive note.

We have finished the work on the previous grant "CryptPad Teams" and all planned features are now live. CryptPad users can now create teams, invite users, and share a drive and a chat with their team. Additionally, CryptPad is more secure as now pads can be shared through encrypted personal mailboxes. This is also much simpler from a UI/UX perspective.

We are starting the work on the new grant which will include a number of highly requested improvements to our spreadsheet and Kanban apps. We have also started to simplify the instance installation process and its documentation. Our goal is to increase the number of independent instances from around 300 to 500 or more by the end of 2020.

Many of our spreadsheet improvements have already been deployed, including an upgrade to version 5.4 of the OnlyOffice editors and a highly important import/export feature allowing interoperability with Microsoft Office formats. This development uses WebAssembly to bring C/C++ code to CryptPad, allowing you to export your sensitive data without the need to reveal your content to our server. We will publish a separate blog article on this development.

We've also introduced support for image insertion into spreadsheets, which brings us a step closer to including office-compatible presentations and text documents which we hope to introduce by the end of the year.

A lot of this work has been financed by the NLNet Grants, but your contribution is also very important as it has been funding the maintenance of the CryptPad code base (many bugs are getting fixed every day) and of the cryptpad.fr instance which now has nearly 25000 registered users and 12000 active weekly users working on pads. The activity on the cryptpad.fr instance has more than doubled in 2019.

Graph of the pad activity per week for the last two years

The Open-Collective Contributions and the subscriptions to cryptpad.fr have reached 10000 Euros for the year 2019 and 15000 Euros all time.

We are reaching a recurrent revenue of 1K Euros per month, with 200 subscribers and donators in 2019, and hoping to double it in 2020.

The cash revenue received each month is the following:

This revenue does not include the NLNet grants which currently represent most of our funding.

Financial support from our community is also very important because it affords our team with stability it needs to continue to improve and maintain the Open Source software as well as the cryptpad.fr instance. We're confident we'll continue to find public grants to help CryptPad move faster. Even so, the support you provide is crucial to decrease our dependence on institutional funding and to avoid the need for outside investment.

We want to thank all the backers and customers who help us get closer to this goal. The major increase in positive feedback we are getting from our users and from larger organizations demonstrates the public's desire for privacy and security. We recognize that our growth is tied to your ability to convince your peers to switch to using encrypted tools, and we're working hard to deliver the features that make the biggest difference in your daily experience. There's always more to do, and so we need to continue to move fast.

Thank you again to our 250 supporters and to NLNet for funding our work and supporting us.

Ludovic, for the CryptPad Team