CiviCRM is growing and improving rapidly, ensuring that organizations around the world have access, more than ever, to an amazing open source CRM and that they have full control over their systems and data.
In fact, on February 1st, 2026, the number of known installations of CiviCRM hit 14,349, the highest in the history of the project!
Despite this great news, on the same day, CiviCRM's financials demonstrated a $59k loss for the past 12 months (cash basis). These and other metrics can be found at https://civicrm.com/about
The reason for this is simple:
we're investing more into maintaining and improving the project than the community is currently willing to sustain.
Consider the progress we've made in the past few years:
- Re-introduction of CiviCRM Standalone - A version of CiviCRM that does not require integration with a CMS. Easy to deploy and use, Standalone is the fastest growing version of CiviCRM.
- Overhaul the default theme framework: Enter RiverLea - A new, refreshing UI that is more flexible and adaptable, and future-proofs CiviCRM's UI.
- SearchKit Everywhere! - SearchKit is more feature rich and more prevalent in the interface than ever before.
- FormBuilder has become the default: Gone are the days of third party form plugins. FormBuilder is maturing rapidly and now manages much of what traditional form builders did. Support for payments is set to be introduced any day.
- The list goes on... you get the point, though!
Not to mention the effort we've put into growing overall brand awareness or the surge in new extensions that are building upon the core improvements we've rolled out. Or the recent growth in events that are taking shape in Paris, Toronto and the UK.
Again, the project and the product are thriving and are quite possibly the best they've ever been.
Member support needed to sustain our progress
While several organizations, partners and contributors have supported our work directly, for which we are truly grateful, there is one segment of our community that has been missing in action when it comes to project sustainability.
Ironically, it's the very segment that stands to benefit most from CiviCRM's stability and ongoing development:
the nonprofit organizations that use it.
In fact, less than .20% of organizations join as members and invest in the software that they rely on. That's a pretty bleak number.
We need to change this! Our ability to sustain the project is entirely dependent on the many thousands of organizations that use CiviCRM.
We're nearing a decision point...
As a community, we have a decision to make. Are we going to step up and help sustain the work of the Core Team or not? It is really that simple.
If we opt not to, then the Core Team will do what it always does... it will consolidate its capacity, which will slow down the development of any new features and functionality. As a result, the product will likely stagnate.
In fact, we've already started down this road. In January of this year, we made the difficult decision to suspend budget for the RiverLea framework. Likewise, we're already pulling back on using contractors to supplement our capacity.
But this isn't the only option. We can, as a community, fund CiviCRM. The question is, "are we going to?"
Are we, as a thriving community of amazing nonprofits around the world doing critical work (and we all know the world needs it!) going to step up and make the investment into CiviCRM by joining as members?
Doing so will close our funding gap and will ensure that the improvements that you've witnessed in the past few years will continue and that CiviCRM, as a product, will continue to set the standard as the premier open source CRM for nonprofits around the world.
The decision is yours...
Part of what makes the CiviCRM project so great is our funding model. While it can, at times, be tenuous (like... right now? :D), we are completely independent and self-funded through a combination of community support (40.14%), revenue share (19.80%), subscriptions (14.55%), and Core Team work (25.51%).
We are not beholden to investors or external funders, and we do not benefit from compromising our userbase in any way shape or form.
We do not spam you with ads or degrade service until you pay. We do not harvest your data and resell it. We do not violate your privacy time and time again. We do not lock you into to our ecosystem. We do not answer to investors that want pay back.
If you appreciate what we're doing and want to help us sustain CiviCRM, then please join us today and invest in the software that empowers your organization while ensuring that you maintain full control and full freedom over your digital platform.
