In summary, SourceHut continues to be sustainable, profitable, and growing. We continued to grow YoY between 2021 and 2022. We were able to make some significant investments, particularly in establishing a new datacenter presence in Europe, and we intend to expand this investment over the course of 2023 and 2024, and we have plenty of capital to invest in this and other business initiatives.
Disclaimer: this report is a summarized approximation of our financials, and is not used for tax purposes.
2022 revenue sources
SourceHut has two main revenue streams:
- Paid subscriptions for the forge platform, which are generally consistent
- Contracts via our consulting arm, which are generally more inconsistent
We use the forge platform revenue as the basis for our financial planning and sustainability model, and treat consulting revenue as capital to fund new projects and investments.
Platform revenue
We issued 12,965 invoices in 2022. Subscriptions are available at three price points: $2, $5, and $10; billed monthly, or annually for a 2 month discount. Invoices paid in 2022 break down as follows:
6,530 $ 2 (paid monthly)
2,456 $ 5 (paid monthly)
917 $10 (paid monthly)
2,141 $ 2 (paid yearly)
604 $ 5 (paid yearly)
227 $10 (paid yearly)
The total revenue from platform subscriptions in 2022 was $132,226.50, which, after payment processing fees, becomes $123,677.57; a 25% increase over 2021. In 2022 a total of 8,544 users signed up for an account, of which 1,066 have paid for their account. This is a conversion rate of about 12%, which is comparable to 2021. Among all registered users (35,877 at the time of writing), about 11% have paid accounts (5,651).
When the beta is completed, all users who own resources on SourceHut (source code repositories, mailing lists, bug trackers, etc) will be expected to pay for their account. Users who contribute to projects owned by others are not expected to pay, and users who wish to own resources but cannot afford the subscription fee will be offered financial aid. In 2022, 81 users received financial aid; 100% of requests for financial aid in 2022 were approved.
The main reasons cited in applications for financial aid remain largely the same as 2021:
- Inability to pay due to financial constraints
- Lack of support for their preferred payment method
- Political sanctions due to the situation in Ukraine and Russia
Consulting revenue
SourceHut accepts consulting projects at the discretion of our full-time engineers, part-time. These contracts are executed in public and are required to only produce free and open source software.
In total, SourceHut received $367,810 in revenue from consulting engagements in 2022.
Summary of revenue
Our total revenue from all sources for 2022, before taxes, expenses, and fees, was $505,307.
Cash on hand
At the close of the year, we had $124,964 USD and €23,297 EUR in cash on hand.
2022 expenses
In 2022 we had the following costs, excluding payroll:
$20,103 European infrastructure investment
$12,018 Infrastructure (colocation, power, network, etc)
$ 8,548 Payment processing fees
$ 1,861 Sponsorships (OpenStreetMap, Codeberg)
$ 1,353 Business-related travel (events)
$ 1,309 Services (Migadu, third-party backups)
$ 1,153 Misc. equipment
$ 816 Domain name registrations
$ 209 Misc. other
Each of our three staff earns a fixed $2500 monthly base pay, and received a $5000 bonus. Staff and contractors (a total of five people in 2022) receive additional income from the consulting arm which varies depending on the contract and amount of time worked.
Base pay for 2022 works out to about $105,000. Including compensation for consulting-related work, the total spent on payroll in 2022 is about $250,000.
Figures for staff compensation are sensitive to currency-related factors due to our presence in the US, Canada, and Europe; these figures are more approximate than the rest of the report.
Our total expenses and investments for 2022 were approximately $272,000.
2022 financial summary
- Revenue
- $505,307
- Expenses & investments
- -$272,688
- Taxes
- -$60,000 (approx)
- Profit
- $172,619 (approx)
Fun fact: as of this year, the lifetime revenue for SourceHut has exceeded $1M USD.
Expectations for 2023
We have three full-time staff paid under the standard compensation model, and about $1400/mo in recurring expenses. Currently, we make about $11000/mo from the platform, putting our monthly profit at about $2000, without factoring in consulting revenue. Thus, the platform provides for a sustainable business independently of our other lines of business.
The breakdown of active subscriptions at the time of writing is as follows:
$2 monthly 595 users
$5 monthly 231 users
$10 monthly 79 users
$2 yearly 2,137 users
$5 yearly 609 users
$10 yearly 234 users
We anticipate spending more on our European datacenter investment as we continue building it out, and we hope to shut down the Philadelphia datacenter in 2023 or early 2024, saving about $600/mo in operating expenses.
We have closed out a major consulting engagement in Q1 2023 and we anticipate a significant reduction in consulting revenue as a consequence. We hope to complete the beta this year (you may have heard that before…), which would likely correspond with a significant increase in platform revenue.
We also anticipate moving some or all our platform revenue into Europe in 2023. We hope to be dealing primarily in Euro by 2024.
Conclusion
In short, SourceHut is profitable and is comfortably succeeding in its efforts to provide sustainable software development & infrastructure for the free and open source software community. We remain committed to investing 100% of our profit into the free and open source community. I want to extend my thanks to the SourceHut community for its role in achieving our goals: sincerely, thank you.