> GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs
That's great. How can a FOSS project afford that? Where does GOS money come from? Did Daniel win the lottery?
That's great. How can a FOSS project afford that? Where does GOS money come from? Did Daniel win the lottery?
They have 14 devs 13 are payed in ETH and 1 in CAD.
Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025. Vitalik Buterin may have donated at least some time ago.
Proton donates double digits.
Cape has donated around 100k https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-supports-grapheneos and plans to donate 100k this year.
There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
> Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025.
That's not enough for 14 devs, plus infrastructure, etc.
> There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million.
Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project.
They should make their financing public (and maybe they do), being a non-profit and also asking people to trust them with their security. Funding provides influence: if 50% came from adtech or public surveillance companies (e.g., Flock, Palantir, etc.), then people would have questions.
>plus infrastructure
A lot must be sponsored. https://xprivate.lol/GrapheneOS/status/2070298479897833725#m
I expect the official account will give you a reply besides my speculation.
They've stated that all money comes from donations.
Most of what they earn is public as a result of the donation method, like crypto. And most donors are completely anonymous.
GrapheneOS does not accept any funding with strings attached.
What role do you have the project? Or where is their public commitment to that statement?
Though they were stating $10 per year. You only need 2.1% of the users to donate $10 monthly to get to the same amount. I think GrapheneOS is one of those projects that is really important to their users, so I wouldn't be surprised if more than 2% of the users donated monthly.
We're paying around 10 full time developers along with multiple other people. That includes someone in a CFO/COO role and several people who handle community management. Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this? We're paying developers around the world rather than hiring people in Silicon Valley. It doesn't cost $250k/year to pay an experienced developer in Eastern Europe.
100% of the funding for GrapheneOS comes from the donations. The vast majority of the donations come from individuals. Cape sells phones with GrapheneOS and is donating $100k/year without any formal sponsorship or deal with them. Donations from individuals are well over $1m/year and will hopefully reach $2m/year soon. We're spending around half of the funding and need to greatly expand our team.
We have a lot more funding available to significantly expand our team are in the process of doing exactly that. We recently hired 3 full time app developers who are working on overhauling our apps. We plan to hire a couple more along with more OS developers. There's also an open role for an experienced QA engineer.
> Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this?
Very few FOSS projects receive seven figures in donations, and dependably enough to budget for them. Good for you; you guys do great work.
Security depends on trust, as you know: Very few users can audit GrapheneOS's code for themselves, and of those people, very few have time to do it. People must trust you to use GOS and for the world to benefit from your efforts. Everything you post on HN relies on trust - almost nobody is checking on it.
IMHO trust requires naming funders, for any organization; secretly funded organizations bringing in millions raise lots of questions. If you don't want to name exact amounts, you could follow many non-profits' practice and name them in ~ logarithmic tiers: $1-100, $101-1,000, $1,001-10,000, etc.
> Cape
Cape is part of the Thiel family (or maybe extended family) of companies. That doesn't condemn them; I'm not expressing an opinion; but realistically it's not a confidence-builder for many people (which is too bad because Cape seems like the most secure service provider I've seen).
Good luck!