Our 2023 Annual Report is now available and you can download it here, along with our audited financial statement.
Here are our highlights for this year:
- 10+ million users in 220+ countries and territories. This is a lowball estimate, as reaching people that are offline is, by definition, pretty hard.
- Most platform work / updates happened on Kiwix-Android and Kiwix-JS.
- Partnerships: Kiwix4schools and Wiki loves Folklore certainly stood out this year.
Revenue and spending remained stable at around 500 kUSD (6.1 FTE at the end of December):
Revenues
We have three main sources of income:
- Grants, by far the largest share. Our main grantor here is the Wikimedia Foundation, on account of us reaching people they cannot (mostly Global South; 80% of their readership is in the North, 80% of ours in the South) and us both being very much aligned on mission (free knowledge!);
- Services are what we sell: that can be access to the hotspot imager, but also when the University of Berlin asked us to make an offline app with their dictionary (release pending);
- Donations are still pretty low, but then most of our platforms don’t even have a donate button or call-to-action (and most of our users can’t afford the internet anyway, so it’s probably not a good idea to expect them to flash their credit card anytime soon). For the anecdote, last year donations ranged from someone giving $1 each month (and still doing it today) to an anonymous benefactor sending a whopping $5,000 in January (unfortunately they did not come back this year (yet?)).
Spending
For the first time this year we had an actual lawyer review our contracts, so that was a new spend.
Goodies last year were mostly t-shirts and chocolate (we’re based in Switzerland, so it is good chocolate that we get from an actual chocolate maker: without volunteers we would not be anywhere close to where we are now and the least we can do is to try and avoid the cheap stuff).
Then there’s the bulk of our spending that happens on code (servers, but mostly developers). Each end node that has a different colour means that it’s a different set of skills (hotspot and openZIM are mostly python, Android is Kotlin, etc.) and, therefore, people.
Content scraping really expanded this year as we recruited a new senior dev for the role (he started in July, so there again expect even more spending on that front in 2024). Another anecdote here: he started as a volunteer a while back, helping with scrapers, and applied when we opened the position – shortest and bestest recruitment process ever.
Platform spending has been fairly minimal otherwise as they are mostly in maintenance mode: there are no new features planned as we try to be better and more reliable in producing new zim files. One exception: Apple products used to be volunteer-managed only but we had to hire a (part-time) guy in order to fulfill the Berlin deal.
Infrastructure spending was fairly low last year as the kind folks at Scaleway simply covered the bills for us – that program has been discontinued for 2024 however. They said they’d come back with a new one, but until then it’s a little under $1,000 that will need to paid every month.
Remember: Kiwix is a non-profit and needs your support to keep going! Help spread offline access by making a donation.
