​Hi,

First happy new year to all our supporters and users. We hope this year will allow us to get back to a more "normal" life. It's been three months since our last status in October and a lot has happened in these last three month for CryptPad.

Again, as in March we have seen a spike of usage on our flagship instance CryptPad.fr, first in November where we have exceeded our usage of April and reached 80k unique IPs per week, and a second time in January with school closing in Germany where we have reached 120K unique IPs per week.

All in all, CryptPad is more and more popular in many countries in the world:

• close to 8000 users have registered on CryptPad.fr in January
• CryptPad.fr has reached 1,5M unique IPs in 2020, 3 times more than 2019
• independent installations of the CryptPad software have increased to now 600 installations from 350 in early 2020 (the chart below tops at 530 but it's not fully correct, but we don't have 1 year of backlog on the correct chart)
• the total revenue for 2020 has reached 30k this year, also 3 times more than 2019
• more than 750 individuals are now supporting us through subscriptions and donations (200 more than in October)
• there are now more than 270 active subscriptions on our flagship instance cryptpad.fr and 200 donators on Open Collective
• since December we have now more than 1 new subscriber every day
• monthly revenue from individual subscriptions and donations have surpassed 4000 Euros, which is now reaching 1 full-time salary paid through this direct revenue

CryptPad is heavily used in the education space, especially in Germany, which represents more than half the usage of CryptPad.fr today. However it's interesting to note that the share of subscriptions and donations is higher in other countries in particular in the United States which represents 32% of our independent funding. Germany represents 25% and Europe 59%. We are however very happy to support the education sector during this pandemic creating difficulties for teachers and students. We will therefore continue to provide 1GB of space for free to all users.

Looking at the funding of CryptPad in 2020, we are very thankful that we have been able to balance our funding in 2020, with the help of European funded research projects from the NGI initiative: NLNet (100KEuros) and NGI Trust (75KEuros), and as well the additional support of the Mozilla foundation. Also we have hired David, and thanks to his PHD Status, we are receiving a special financial help for 2 years from the French state through the "Crédit Impôt Recherche", which has allowed us to keep this financial balance and have a team of 3 people.

Concerning 2021, we are already starting the year with one funded research project from NLNet (50kEuros) and we hope to be able to increase our direct revenues from subscription and donations to 50-60KEuros. This is not yet enough to fully fund the year 2021, but we hope to be able to get one or more new research projects over 75k to fully fund our year and start funding 2022. We believe there are multiple calls we can target.

We have published a summary of the funding on the CryptPad Wiki also displayed below:

If not we will need more help from our subscribers and donators. Also we would like to hire in the future in order to be able to accelerate and improve CryptPad at a faster rate. So don't hesitate to renew your help if you were a one-time donator or chip in if you are not yet a subscriber or donator. We also welcome donations from organizations that believe in our objective of bringing privacy to all users.

Our goal is that in 2023 (in 2 years), with a regular growth rate of CryptPad.fr and CryptPad installation usage, we will at least fund the current team of three through subscriptions on CryptPad.fr or donators, which would allow us to focus additional project funding on new hires or contractors.

On the development side, we have released 26 new versions of CryptPad, with a many new features and improvements.

You can look at Aaron's post from early January and also all the release notes of the software. Most recently we released the first version of our new cycle with a new logo and a new look and feel. Also we have released silently in the last few weeks, improvements coming from the NGI Trust project to speed up loading time and caching which will be especially useful for mobile usage. These changes also have the very important objective to reduce the load on the server, allowing us to scale to more users. We have also released more export capabilities for spreadsheets including PDF export.

As always we are committed to Open Source and to focus on the success of the project. We try as much as possible to act much more than we talk. We regularly report about what we have done in order to allow YOU to judge our work and if we made good use of the money we received. We have the CryptPad survey where you can tell us about which improvements you would like to see more and also give us feedback in general. Now the best feedback you can give us is to continue to use and enjoy our software, publicly support us and when possible recommend us to your friends.

The hardest part of improving privacy is to help people change their own behavior and habits, giving up some features and the tools of heavily marketed free tools for privacy preserving tools build by much smaller companies not having the same marketing budget.

Thanks again for all your support during this year. It means a lot.

Ludovic, for the CryptPad Team

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