I’m proud and happy to mention that curl just passed the magic limit of 100,000 USD in raised sponsorship money. Or call it donations if you want. Since April 2018. That’s about 40 months.
Donate?
Donations over time
A grand total of 440 awesome organizations and individuals have donated money to the curl project since we started our Open Collective fund, at almost 1300 separate occasions. It makes the averages to be about 77 USD per donation and 230 USD per sponsor. As usual, there’s a very long tail of single sponsors that donated a small amount and there’s a small set of sponsors who have donated lots of money many times.
We use donated money primarily for the bug-bounty, but recently we also spread sticker love across the world with the help of donated funds. The fund will also be used to pay for our annual developer meetups (that have been paused during covid) and potentially for some hardware and other infrastructure to aid the project and it’s core contributors.
Note: that we also have a set of sponsors who fund services and infrastructure directly for us without funneling the money through us. The shear value of those services are in several instances even greater in total than what the largest monetary contributors have given us.
Net vs gross details
This counts the 100K USD net amount that ended up in our fund. That is with the fees involved already deducted. Gross, that means we were given more than 100K already.
Before Open Collective you ask?
We never saw any serious donations to speak of before we started this collective. Before then we received the occasional donations to my PayPal account but they were very spurious and very far apart and never amounted to any “real money”.
Independent
I want to take this opportunity and remind readers that curl is a totally independent and stand-alone project. We’re not part of any larger/umbrella organization and we’re not run or owned by any company. It gives us total freedom to do whatever we want but it also means we need to fund things ourselves and find our own benefactors. Fortunately, we have many friends!