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The Thunderbird team, responsible for the open source cross-platform Thunderbird email client, published its financial report this week.
Almost all revenue of the project is based on donations. The team states that about 99.9% of revenue comes from user donations.

The project team has received USD 6.4 million in 2022 from donations, a more than 100% increase over 2021's USD 2.7 million in donations. The jump is remarkable and a comparison of the revenue of the past six years shows no comparable jump in revenue. The team received USD 736,000 in 2017 and revenue from donations has increased each year since that year.

The team explains the revenue jump with its increased communication efforts, which started at the end of 2021. It started to post blog posts and the newsletter more frequently, posted more on social media, and has expanded its reach by joining new services, including Mastadon. Also, the team introduced the first in-app donation appeal in the Thunderbird 102 release at the end of 2022.

Compared to 2021, donations were always higher in each month, but the main push came at the end of the year when donations skyrocketed in comparison.



The increase in revenue from donations allowed the team to expand its staff further. The project team began with 15 core staff members in 2022 and ended the year with 24 core staff members.

The Thunderbird project hat expenses of USD 3.569 million in 2022. Most money has been spend on personnel, 79,8%, followed by general and administrative, professional services and donation processing fees.

2022 has been a major year for the Thunderbird project. The project acquired the K-9 email client for Android and started to prepare it to become Thunderbird for Android eventually. On the desktop, the team made large architectural changes to Thunderbird, which will culminate in the release of Thunderbird 115 later this year. Plans have been set in motion to create an iOS client for Thunderbird and an iOS developer will be hired later in 2023 to start work on that version of the email client.

Closing Words

The Thunderbird project is doing well financially and also development-wise. 2023 will be a key year for the project, with the release of Thunderbird 115 for the desktop and Thunderbird for Android.

One has to wonder how much Mozilla would be able to earn in revenue from donations, if it would follow Thunderbird's lead.

You find more information on the financials at the official Thunderbird blog.
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