Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser
ziglang.org
ziglang.org
Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?
Otherwise the lack of sponsoring from the "big players" seems rather shocking. You'd think that zig has a decent chance in helping MS/Meta/Google/etc. somewhere along the way.
Not at all. We would be definitely open & happy to learn that one of the big companies are using Zig and would be interested in supporting us.
(but we don't plan to give up board seats)
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem: they need more money to keep doing its great work and thrive to reach 1.0 but good money comes from 1.0 and beyond.
The Zig Foundation model of paying contributors is really interesting. I don't think I've seen it done on this scale before, but hope it takes off.
Honestly it's not clear to me that the money they have in income now is enough to accomplish the ambition, but I guess that's why it is a fundraiser in addition to a financial report.
Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.
The expenses listed here are accounting for 100% of the expenses paid by the organization. If you go fetch the 990 from the IRS and look at the totals, it will match dollar-for-dollar, cent-for-cent. So if I deleted taxes from this report, you would hopefully all be wondering, where did that $13,089.07 go?
Happy to answer any other questions.
Edit: I see the question is about income tax vs payroll tax categorization. As this isn't my area of expertise and it's getting late, I'll wait until tomorrow to check carefully and make any necessary clarifications.
> we need more recurring donations
Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?
Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).
> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?
Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. The salary he could get in a private company has no effect on that.
> Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).
Fair point.
Big ones do! For example, Python/JavaScript/Linux. Some are developed by companies (e.g. Go/Java/Kotlin). Seems perfectly sensible that companies using Zig would donate to the language...
It's not unheard of. Eg, Blender earns $261,360/month. (https://fund.blender.org/) Companies should more eagerly support open source projects they rely on with funding. It keeps their dependencies competitive with much more expensive commercial products, and a broad base of donations prevents a project from being dominated by specific large corporate interests which might run counter to their average user.
There's an article somewhere on the rationale of Andrew's salary. From the top of my head it was based on an median lead developer salary in the area.
Honestly that seems fair, obviously less than he would have in the private sector, but still high enough to not burn out and have a comfortable life.
checks profile
there it is
Just a consumer. Hope that it is ok to choose or like something else. Please don't be angry. If it counts for anything, fine with things going well for you.
> "Baseless accusation"
No sir, not baseless. At one time, the pocket watching of competitors was real and they getting just $927/month (figure from your .me site and many other places) from their happy fans and loyal supporters seemed too much to bear.
Now that one's personal pocket is fat with $12,500/month, perhaps we can hope to see good will and grace extended to others besides one's self. The world is big enough for creators to be professionally respectful of each other and to allow consumers to choose what they like.
I’m sure there are many people that would happily donate more so he can make more for his work. Which I had the budget to donate atm
Very relevant - why all the bad blood?
What a waste of money, seriously
But if it's also including the cost of all the CI and build steps for the entirety of Zig infra?
That seems pretty reasonable for me. Although maybe my cousin Katie could do it for 1/10th the price in WordPress
Source: https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual...
$15k seems pretty lean to me for Zig since it includes hardware purchases.
Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig, so their infrastructure costs are not as bad in comparison.
1. I highly doubt your ballpark estimate.
2. I don't think CIs care that much how many users a language has, they care about the number of computations they need to run for each commit/merge.
To give you a sense of Rust’s growth, check out this proxy for usage (https://lib.rs/stats). Usage roughly doubled each year for 10 years. 2^10 = 1,024. It’s possible Zig could manage a similar adoption rate after reaching 1.0, but right now it’s probably where Rust was in 2015.
> CIs don’t scale with the number of users
Each Rust release involves a crater run, where they try to compile every open source Rust repo to check for regressions. This costs money and scales with the number of repos out there. But it is true, this only happens once in 6 weeks.
But I think the factor that makes a bigger difference is that Rusts code bases are larger and CI takes longer to run on each commit.
And Rust compilations are much slower too.
Rust is used in production by many companies out there.
Rust was hated not because of Zig or any other languages, but their Rust Evangelism Strike Force. Some day these comparison may back fire. Zig can stand on its own now, and already quite widely known. May be best to have peace rather than war.
Just my ( may be useless ) 2 cents.
Don’t find myself choosing between rust/zig after using them both a decent amount
The RESF became unbearable because Rust leaders quietly encouraged language wars online, and especially offline. Zig should avoid that fate.
There's no war here, only facts that help an ignorant person gain perspective about how much things cost.
Of course comparisons are inevitable or to be helpful, but then let consumers choose what they like and find to be useful. Leadership should not be seen by everyone as in the forefront of throwing gas on the flames, displaying unprofessional behavior, or allow themselves to be known as the face of toxicity.
We don't know much of it was burned to cloud. Perhaps in 2026 report in will be $0 (or just electricity costs) because it all runs in-house.