Every December, while the rest of the world is celebrating the holidays, I've put (as Strategic Director) together a board report summarising the year behind, and outlining our plans for the year ahead. Sharing that report with our member projects (we call them Collectives) and supporters has been a goal for the past few years, but as is often the case, the work quickly becomes the higher priority, and we have simply not published an update.

This year is different.

Yes, it's May, and yes, a lot has changed in the past four months. But it's right that we should live by the values of openness and transparency core to our mission and unique to our execution. So here it is: 

OSC received ~12.5m in contributions in 2024, just under the 12.8m received in 2022. After experiencing a 23% decline in 2023, we're back to where we were before inflation and interest rates rose, which resulted in a massive contraction in overall tech spending and investment.

We have lots to celebrate: this year, we've seen contributions from GitHub Sponsors grow 40% to just over $1m in the year. Tahoe LAFS became one of our most significant projects, Microsoft returned as a cornerstone sponsor to Open Web Docs with a 500k donation, and Google ran both their Season of Docs and Summer of Code programmes through us. Overall, we saw a general uplift in donations from the same number of sponsors: 33,187 vs. 33,761 in 2023, and our data show our most diverse contributor base yet.

Payouts to maintainers rose 20% on top of 2023's record year, totalling $9.7m. Open Source Collective is moving more money to open source developers than we ever have, and we've been doing that year on year since 2021, when we paid a mere 44% of the total amount of incoming funds on behalf of our member projects. In 2024, that figure is nearly 80%, which is a strategic success for us.

Finally, in January, we surpassed $50m in contributions received since we started in 2017, which we celebrated appropriately.

Our finances are open; every cent of Open Source Collective's revenue and expenses can be seen at https://opencollective.com/opensource. The following are excerpts from our board report to clarify and aggregate information for our board's (and your) benefit:

OSC began the year with 689k in our operational balance. We made 2.1m in revenue, and spent 1.8m, finishing the year at 911k. Revenue was up on a projected $1.5m due to an additional 200k in host fees (1.2m total), 35k in interest payments (548k total), and 360k in expenses incurred by and invoiced back to member projects, i.e., maintainer salaries and associated costs.

Of our 1.8m expenditure, $232k was paid to Open Collective Inc. as 'host fee platform shares' until October 1st, after which we transitioned Open Collective to a new non-profit of which we are the keystone member: OFiCo. A fixed monthly membership fee was paid to OFiCo for the remainder of the year, totalling $150k. 

Operational expenditure of $1.3m consisted of:

The remainder covered workspace allocations, board remuneration, and event sponsorships.

In February, following the dissolution of Open Collective Foundation, we decided to take the opportunity to transition Open Collective to a community-centred non-profit. As lead member supporting this process took a toll on our team's ability to forward our strategic goals, but we did not stand still. We continued to grow our largest programmatic area, our fiscal hosting program (see 'trends' above).  The remainder of our current strategy contains three focus areas, which we use to organise our progress report below:

An ecosystem-wide approach to supporting open source software

Two years ago, we secured funding to develop ecosyste.ms, which would commit OSC to maintaining the project for the foreseeable future. Ecosyste.ms has continued to grow its user base over the year, adding three significant corporate supporters and users in 2024.

In December we soft-launched Ecosystem Funds with Sentry, who donated $75k budget through the service at launch as part of the OSS Pledge campaign. Since writing this report in January, Ecosystem Funds has been available to the general public, and we are working with a number of partners to support their use cases while we market the service.

Make financially contributing to open source not only a good business decision, but an easy one

We have since begun work on our next project: a tool to track all your open source ‘investments’, to better understand the impact your money has on the projects you depend on most. We will launch Ecosystem Dashboards in the coming weeks and look forward to sharing more with you then.

Enable projects to use their money as well as raise it

In 2024, we did not make the progress we wished; we did not open up our workshops concept, trialled in 2022 (though those resources are still available), we did not expand our conference support, nor did we create an offers and needs marketplace, trialled at Open Collective Foundation.

That said, we hope that open source maintainers will heed our call to support others, directly or programatically, through Ecosystem Funds whose software exists unseen in the deep dependency tree of open source infrastructure. 

Next week we'll share part two of our board report, focussing on our roadmap, projected finances, and strategy for 2025-2028.