NixOS Foundation Financial Report 2025

Meta NixOS Foundation
1

Following the previous financial report, here is the one for the past year. Comparisons to the previous year are included where it’s doable and makes sense. My sources are our internal accounting software and OpenCollective.

Please note that until now, the OpenCollective balance of ~€350k was not reflecting reality, because it didn’t include all expenses outside OpenCollective. Starting now, we’ll start regularly synchronising the main collectives balance to the currently available funds (specifically equity minus OC project balance). This means the current balance now roughly reflects the current reserves.

Summary

2025 was dominated by a ~€38k corporate tax payment for the incomes from 2021 through 2023 (19% tax rate + interest on ~€198k total income), which makes the numbers this year look like a loss, when really it’s just that we haven’t had as much income as originally thought in past years. Taking that out of the equation, 2025 had a win of €13.129,76. On our roadmap is for the foundation to become an ANBI (public-benefit organisation), which would allow us to deduct donations from the taxable income, which is one of the reasons I’m working on better financial reporting.

New expenses include the trademark filing and the marketing team. NixCon 2025 was very successful with over €33k revenue. Hetzner costs increased due to the Equinix sponsoring ending. We also have some new revenue from our first general sponsor TII.

Details

  • Expenses: -€118.916,58 (last year: -€119.842,32[1])
    • Corporate Tax: -€38.149,00
    • Infrastructure: -€25.075,78 (last year: -€65.986,66)
      • AWS (Storage/Cache): -€3.963,59 (last year: -€56.140,88)
      • Hetzner (Servers): -€19.356,27 (last year: -€8.135,25)
      • Hardware depreciation (Macs): -€942,52 (last year: -€1.001,00)
      • Netlify (Deployments): -€353,19 (last year: -€312,07)
      • Gandi (Domains): -€289,85 (last year: -€211,46)
      • rsync.net (Backups): -€170,36 (last year: -€186,00)
    • Administrative assistant: -€12.363,86 (last year: -€10.999,92)
    • VAT[2]: —€11.183,97 (last year: -€12.876,52)
    • Event funding: -€8.832,28 (last year: -€7.876,88)
    • Trademark: -€6.891,16
    • Marketing team: -€4.791,75
    • Subscriptions: -€3.086,44 (last year: -€2.542,53)
      • Notion (Documents): -€1.409,26 (last year: -€982,57)
      • SendInBlue (Newsletter): -€346,80 (last year: -€248,00)
      • Docusign (Signatures): -€394,64 (last year: -€41,53)
      • E-boekhouden (Accounting): -€114,00 (last year: -€138,00)
      • eHerkenning/Reconi (Gov auth): -€277,04
      • DocHub (Signatures): -€124,70 (last year: -€134,62)
      • Citibox (Post box): -€420,00 (last year: -€326,70)
    • Documentation team: -€2.609,00 (last year: -€10.223,50)
    • NixCon 2024 spillover: -€2.086,69
    • NGI0 Participation: -€2.012,77
    • Tax consultant: -€1.175,00 (last year: -€405,35)
    • Banking fees: -€270,39 (last year: -€437,64)
    • VAT fines: -€167,00
    • Misc: -€148,11 (last year: -€11,18)
    • NGI0 transaction fees: -€38,25
    • OpenCollective Platform Settlements: -€35,13
  • Revenue: +€93.897,34 (last year: +€63.980,10[1:1])
    • Donations (includes donations to ear-marked OpenCollective projects): +€48.788,16 (last year: +€63.900,45)
      • Stripe: +€39.742,36
      • SumUp: +€4.682,77
      • Bank Payments: +€1.741,56
      • Benevity: +€1.554,65
      • Paypal: +€602,31
      • GitHub Sponsors: +€464,51
    • NixCon 2025: €33.259,95 (NixCon 2024: -€10.503,18)
      • Revenue: +€128.801,17 (NixCon 2024: +€78.290,87)
      • Expenses: -€95.541,22 (NixCon 2024: -€88.794,05)
    • Non-event sponsors: +€10.000,00
    • Infrastructure support: +€600,00
    • Google Summer of Code 2024: +€482,40
    • STF Participation: +€386,32
    • Interest: +€380,51 (last year: +€6,20)

Total income: -€25.019,24
Total income without corporate tax for previous years: +€13.129,76

Historical end-of-year balance (equity):

  • 2025: €168.111,08 (-€25.019,24)
  • 2024: €193.130,32 (-€55.862,22)
  • 2023: €248.992,54 (+€87.167,64)
  • 2022: €161.824,90 (+€37.017,71)
  • 2021: €124.807,19 (+€73.885,64)
  • 2020: €50.921,55

With corporate tax costs spread over the respective years:

  • 2025: €168.111,08 (+€13.129,76)
  • 2024: €154.981,32 (-€55.862,22)
  • 2023: €210.843,54 (+€69.356,64)
  • 2022: €141.486,90 (+€30.547,71)
  • 2021: €110.939,19 (+€60.017,64)
  • 2020: €50.921,55

Crowdfunding campaigns yearly summary

Conclusion

If you’d like to help with our expenses, you can either donate

Or sponsor:

We appreciate it!

— NixOS Foundation board (@infinisil, @ra33it0, @lassulus, @ron, @ryantrinkle) :heart:

  1. This number has a ~€65 discrepancy with the 2024 report because of some retroactive accounting cleanups ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Because we don’t generate any revenue from most services we pay for, we cannot pass the respective VAT onto paying consumers, and as such are deemed an end-user for those services and have to pay their VAT. With a better accounting system we might be able to divide this more clearly into the respective services, but our current one makes this really hard, so we’re listing this as a separate item. ↩︎

45 Likes
Omarchy and NixOS
2

Thank you for the report! This might be a silly question but what is the best place to sponsor (such as less overhead more to the project)?

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For individual donations, bank transfers are great: Donate | Nix & NixOS

To actually sponsor as a company, get in touch: Become a Sponsor | Nix & NixOS :slight_smile:

6 Likes
4

Naively, I thought that was already the case… Thanks for working on it!

2 Likes
5

Thanks for the transparency!

It’s not really critical for the reporting of this year’s finances, but I’m a bit confused as to how last year’s donations of 64.928,92 could be more than last year’s revenue of 63.914,47. Am I misunderstanding something, or is this perhaps a small reporting error?

EDIT: addressed below :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Thank you! Indeed there was a mistake in there: Internal accounting shows that in 2024 donations were ~€1028 larger than they actually were (originating from OpenCollective platform tips, which is money people send us, but we need to send back to OpenCollective), and I corrected that in the last report, but for this one I used the incorrect numbers again. Fixed now!

6 Likes
7

To actually sponsor as a company, please reach out with the Teams directly:)

8

what are the Hetzner expenses bound on? is that like CPU, RAM or just kinda test runtime?
(i presume it’s mostly about Hydra, but didn’t so much see Hetzner mentions at the grafana dashboards.)
maybe reason i’m curious is i wonder to what extent the RAM crunch is affecting us.

1 Like
9

Can we get some insight into this difference since its a huge one?

Also thanks for this report, can only imagine how much work is involved, especially to you @Infinisil :slight_smile:

1 Like
10

See last years report: NixOS Foundation Financial Report 2024 :wink:

3 Likes
11

It’s renting physical machines (mainly for linux part of the hydra.nixos.org farm). I don’t think Hetzner publishes how much of their prices is for RAM, etc.

3 Likes
12

fwiw I asked this on Wednesday last week about this specific part, and we’ll get a breakdown of the costs here from the board soon.

It may just be the price changes have been that severe, but if there is a potential for savings here, and there absolutely could be, I think we’ll see what we can do.

2 Likes
13

Little suggestion: I did a project in GitHub - lewtec/contapila: Beancount/Fava-class ledger in Go (Cobra + embedded CUE + tree-sitter). See SPEC.md. · GitHub which is essentially beancount but can generate static sites, that could be a public git repo and people can see the stream of things and perhaps suggest ways to make it more efficient. If you guys have any question on how it works or want help to set up just let me know, I am happy to help!

Also, about the expenses:

  • Why there are two signature systems?
  • Why notion is costing so much? Is there any other FOSS/selfhosted thing that could do the trick?
  • At least in brazil, there is a trick that we can give autonomy to our accountants to act in name of the company without having to pay for a digital certificate, not sure how something like that would work in Germany (I am assuming from the name of things)
  • Doesn’t something like Wise have less to no banking fee? I, at least, am having fees only for doing currency conversions
  • As a contractor, because I export services I have a tax reduction, idk how it works but in Brazil this is valid
2 Likes
14

On one hand it’s the migration of builders from Equinix to Hetzner, and on the other it’s a general increase of pricing. We’re conscious of the cost and are trying to minimize them when possible.

Why there are two signature systems?

DocHub was switched to Docusign in that year, but now since 2026 we’ve switched to a self-hosted Docuseal: Docuseal · Issue #972 · NixOS/infra · GitHub

Why notion is costing so much? Is there any other FOSS/selfhosted thing that could do the trick?

It’s used by the NixOS Foundation’s NGI0 project management accounting. We’re considering self-hosted Grist in the future, but migrating takes a lot of effort.

Doesn’t something like Wise have less to no banking fee? I, at least, am having fees only for doing currency conversions

Banking fees are mostly the bank account itself, some SEPA and Swift transactions, and actually Wise as well.

5 Likes
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And mind that apart from twiddling with the infrastructure, a full migration is enormous effort to make sure all the workflows still do the right thing, all of which costs way more than that Notion account. When I was still running the NGI project, I eventually stopped being convinced it was a good use of our time, and thus stopped pushing for it. Like it or not, Notion works the most okayest for the purpose. I‘d still recommend self-hosting something for new projects where there’s no migration cost.

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Is this a 2025 sponsor, or 2026? Asking cause I was curious about the sponsorship tier, and couldn’t find the sponsor explicitly in the list. Is it this one?

Non-event sponsors: +€10.000,00

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Yup that’s the one, 2025

1 Like