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Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

167 points by smlavine 1y ago

smlavine 1y ago
Related recent news, the 0.15.1 release with the start of some IO changes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701
anigbrowl 1y ago
A masterclass in clear writing and transparency. I wish all nonprofits were like this.
- veber-alex 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sealeck 1y ago
    I think you're a little too angry about this.
    - veber-alex 1y ago
      oh 100%. I am just annoyed that every time Zig developers publish some articles or even make some comments here on HN they always contain something negative about someone else. Like even in this thread when someone said that Zig wastes too much money on infrastructure the first thing Andrew Kelly does is to show that Rust spends much more.
      - jaredklewis 1y ago
        I just read AndyKelley's comment you mentioned, and I can't find anything wrong with it; it's not even saying anything negative about Rust. It just observes that Rust spends more. Is $100k/year a good salary? Depends. For a software engineer, no, since most software engineers make more. For a paramedic, yes, since most paramedics make less. To know if $15k is a lot to spend on CI and a website, a great way to answer that question is to look at what peers spend on the same thing. Hard to think of many better peer comparisons for Zig than Rust.
        veber-alex 1y ago
        To continue with your metaphor what he did is basically say "My salary is great because I make more than that other guy". That doesn't mean anything. The comparison to Rust is meaningless. Each project has different demands and requirements from their infrastructure. For example, Rust compiles all open-source crates on a regular basis to test for regressions. You can't just point to Rust and say, "Look at that guy." If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.
        ksec 1y ago
        >The comparison to Rust is meaningless. >If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes. And they did. Comparing to anything is how a normal human would judge whether the spending is relevant. It is call price comparison. Whether it is a valid comparison is up to the person to decide. And more often that not when the two pricing are so vastly different that person should look a little deeper.
      - anigbrowl 1y ago
        As your other comment was flagged to death, no I'm not kidding you. I don't use Zig (or indeed Rust) so I don't have any particular feeling about the personalities or relative merits of the languages, other than that they are inferior because I don't like them as much as my favorites. I think it's a good report because it's very clearly written and I was able to pick up a great deal of information about their financial situation/dynamics from a quick scan of less than a minute. I think if you're asking people for money, having a very high signal-noise ratio like that is optimal. I can read other formats (eg I have been browsing nonprofit form 990s for many years), but I like communication that is short and to the point.
  - kristoff_it 1y ago
    The longevity of donation platforms is a major concern for us and GitHub has not been good in that sense. GitHub Sponsors has not seen a single improvement in the years after its launch (despite us and other organizations chatting with GitHub employees about critical missing features), and GitHub Actions has been tragicomically buggy, clearly showing that software engineering infrastructure is not GitHub's core focus anymore (on top of, you know, the CEO explicitly saying that GitHub is an AI company now). Related https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Since we do see ourselves eventually migrating away from GitHub (at least in some form), we would like to steer donations towards a service that we have higher confidence in.
  - maztaim 1y ago
    The transparency and clarity is something others should attempt to model in my opinion. If a child can understand it, then what does it hurt to be childish in the report? As a professional I wish more would report in like fashion.
unclad5968 1y ago
I know literally nothing about business accounting or business taxes. Why does the expenses include both the employee's compensation and also their taxes? Do businesses claim their employees taxes as expenses? Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.
- stock_toaster 1y ago
  https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/understanding-employment-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
- AndyKelley 1y ago
  Hello, I am the author of the post. 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.
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    i think the question is more of "is that payroll/employment tax"? the way it's written uses the word "income tax" carefully noting the distinction. you may want to edit it to say "payroll tax", which makes more sense.
  - unclad5968 1y ago
    I think I understand from the other comments. I never considered that it is technically an expense to withhold the income taxes of employees and then pay it to the IRS.
    - te 1y ago
      I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that number is not actually employee income tax, even though the report seems to suggest the same. Employee income tax is an expense of the employee, not the employer. If it is income tax withholding, it's way too small for $150k+ of employee comp, which is another reason I don't think it's that. Instead, I expect this tax line item to be primarily the employer share of FICA tax, which is typically considered a payroll tax instead of an income tax.
WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
> CI & Website $14,986.73 What a waste of money, seriously
- sroerick 1y ago
  This would not be wildly out of place for a small to medium business running a business card website. On the high end, certainly, but not unheard of. 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
  - kristoff_it 1y ago
    It's also the one-time cost of buying some machines, not just renting.
- AndyKelley 1y ago
  For comparison, in the same year Rust Foundation spent $567,000 on this category - more than ZSF's entire expenses for everything. That's 38x more money. Source: https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual-Report-2024.pdf https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual...
  - modernerd 1y ago
    The report says that includes two full-time infrastructure engineers. Which isn’t crazy given Rust infrastructure’s userbase and traffic. $15k seems pretty lean to me for Zig since it includes hardware purchases.
  - anonfordays 1y ago
    >That's 38x more money. Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig, so their infrastructure costs are not as bad in comparison.
    - epolanski 1y ago
DrNosferatu 1y ago
What’s the role of LLM coding on Zig?
- DrNosferatu 1y ago
  …because of “ZML” - what is this? Very relevant - why all the bad blood?
zapnuk 1y ago
Kudos to bun for investing in a promising technology. 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.
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  > Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors? 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)
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    Can't wait for Microsoft to release Zag in 2027.
- geokon 1y ago
  Since it's not a 1.0, it seems at face value it's be difficult for a "big player" to use it in production. As far as I understand, breaking changes are expected.
  - SchwKatze 1y ago
    Yeah, makes sense, 1.0 is probably a critical point for a project like this, where from it, "big players" start trusting its business to the lang and therefore having a high interest on funding. 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.
IshKebab 1y ago
Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. (Not saying it's undeserved.) > 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?
- PaywallBuster 1y ago
  that doesn't account for personal income tax
- sealeck 1y ago
  > Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. 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).
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    > Why? 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.
    - sealeck 1y ago
      > Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. 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...
benji-york 1y ago
"Even with a 13% bigger budget, we still managed to spend 92% of our money in 2024 paying contributors for their time." 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.
- jmull 1y ago
  I think the ambition is much larger than what could be accomplished by part-time volunteer work. It was either this or somehow get a bigcorp to dedicate 2, 5, 10 full time salaries to it. 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.
larodi 1y ago
Nice breakdown but renders awfully on Safari Mobile/iOS
- AndyKelley 1y ago
  Made an effort to improve that this morning. How's it looking for you now?
SchwKatze 1y ago
It's kinda sad the state of things where startups with only buzzwords and slop (I'm looking at you horoscope AI app) end up raising more money than actual tech projects that will, actually, improve infrastructure and innovation.

167 points by smlavine 1y ago

Related recent news, the 0.15.1 release with the start of some IO changes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701

anigbrowl 1y ago

A masterclass in clear writing and transparency. I wish all nonprofits were like this.

veber-alex 1y ago
[flagged]
- sealeck 1y ago
  I think you're a little too angry about this.
  - veber-alex 1y ago
    oh 100%. I am just annoyed that every time Zig developers publish some articles or even make some comments here on HN they always contain something negative about someone else. Like even in this thread when someone said that Zig wastes too much money on infrastructure the first thing Andrew Kelly does is to show that Rust spends much more.
    - jaredklewis 1y ago
      I just read AndyKelley's comment you mentioned, and I can't find anything wrong with it; it's not even saying anything negative about Rust. It just observes that Rust spends more. Is $100k/year a good salary? Depends. For a software engineer, no, since most software engineers make more. For a paramedic, yes, since most paramedics make less. To know if $15k is a lot to spend on CI and a website, a great way to answer that question is to look at what peers spend on the same thing. Hard to think of many better peer comparisons for Zig than Rust.
      - veber-alex 1y ago
        To continue with your metaphor what he did is basically say "My salary is great because I make more than that other guy". That doesn't mean anything. The comparison to Rust is meaningless. Each project has different demands and requirements from their infrastructure. For example, Rust compiles all open-source crates on a regular basis to test for regressions. You can't just point to Rust and say, "Look at that guy." If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.
        ksec 1y ago
        >The comparison to Rust is meaningless. >If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes. And they did. Comparing to anything is how a normal human would judge whether the spending is relevant. It is call price comparison. Whether it is a valid comparison is up to the person to decide. And more often that not when the two pricing are so vastly different that person should look a little deeper.
    - anigbrowl 1y ago
      As your other comment was flagged to death, no I'm not kidding you. I don't use Zig (or indeed Rust) so I don't have any particular feeling about the personalities or relative merits of the languages, other than that they are inferior because I don't like them as much as my favorites. I think it's a good report because it's very clearly written and I was able to pick up a great deal of information about their financial situation/dynamics from a quick scan of less than a minute. I think if you're asking people for money, having a very high signal-noise ratio like that is optimal. I can read other formats (eg I have been browsing nonprofit form 990s for many years), but I like communication that is short and to the point.
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  The longevity of donation platforms is a major concern for us and GitHub has not been good in that sense. GitHub Sponsors has not seen a single improvement in the years after its launch (despite us and other organizations chatting with GitHub employees about critical missing features), and GitHub Actions has been tragicomically buggy, clearly showing that software engineering infrastructure is not GitHub's core focus anymore (on top of, you know, the CEO explicitly saying that GitHub is an AI company now). Related https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Since we do see ourselves eventually migrating away from GitHub (at least in some form), we would like to steer donations towards a service that we have higher confidence in.
- maztaim 1y ago
  The transparency and clarity is something others should attempt to model in my opinion. If a child can understand it, then what does it hurt to be childish in the report? As a professional I wish more would report in like fashion.

unclad5968 1y ago

I know literally nothing about business accounting or business taxes. Why does the expenses include both the employee's compensation and also their taxes? Do businesses claim their employees taxes as expenses? Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.

stock_toaster 1y ago
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/understanding-employment-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
AndyKelley 1y ago
Hello, I am the author of the post. 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.
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  i think the question is more of "is that payroll/employment tax"? the way it's written uses the word "income tax" carefully noting the distinction. you may want to edit it to say "payroll tax", which makes more sense.
- unclad5968 1y ago
  I think I understand from the other comments. I never considered that it is technically an expense to withhold the income taxes of employees and then pay it to the IRS.
  - te 1y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that number is not actually employee income tax, even though the report seems to suggest the same. Employee income tax is an expense of the employee, not the employer. If it is income tax withholding, it's way too small for $150k+ of employee comp, which is another reason I don't think it's that. Instead, I expect this tax line item to be primarily the employer share of FICA tax, which is typically considered a payroll tax instead of an income tax.

WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago

> CI & Website $14,986.73 What a waste of money, seriously

sroerick 1y ago
This would not be wildly out of place for a small to medium business running a business card website. On the high end, certainly, but not unheard of. 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
- kristoff_it 1y ago
  It's also the one-time cost of buying some machines, not just renting.
AndyKelley 1y ago
For comparison, in the same year Rust Foundation spent $567,000 on this category - more than ZSF's entire expenses for everything. That's 38x more money. Source: https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual-Report-2024.pdf https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual...
- modernerd 1y ago
  The report says that includes two full-time infrastructure engineers. Which isn’t crazy given Rust infrastructure’s userbase and traffic. $15k seems pretty lean to me for Zig since it includes hardware purchases.
- anonfordays 1y ago
  >That's 38x more money. Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig, so their infrastructure costs are not as bad in comparison.
  - epolanski 1y ago

DrNosferatu 1y ago

What’s the role of LLM coding on Zig?

DrNosferatu 1y ago
…because of “ZML” - what is this? Very relevant - why all the bad blood?

zapnuk 1y ago

Kudos to bun for investing in a promising technology. 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.

kristoff_it 1y ago
> Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors? 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)
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  Can't wait for Microsoft to release Zag in 2027.
geokon 1y ago
Since it's not a 1.0, it seems at face value it's be difficult for a "big player" to use it in production. As far as I understand, breaking changes are expected.
- SchwKatze 1y ago
  Yeah, makes sense, 1.0 is probably a critical point for a project like this, where from it, "big players" start trusting its business to the lang and therefore having a high interest on funding. 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.

IshKebab 1y ago

Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. (Not saying it's undeserved.) > 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?

PaywallBuster 1y ago
that doesn't account for personal income tax
sealeck 1y ago
> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. 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).
- IshKebab 1y ago
  > Why? 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.
  - sealeck 1y ago
    > Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. 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...

benji-york 1y ago

"Even with a 13% bigger budget, we still managed to spend 92% of our money in 2024 paying contributors for their time." 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.

jmull 1y ago
I think the ambition is much larger than what could be accomplished by part-time volunteer work. It was either this or somehow get a bigcorp to dedicate 2, 5, 10 full time salaries to it. 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.

larodi 1y ago

Nice breakdown but renders awfully on Safari Mobile/iOS

AndyKelley 1y ago
Made an effort to improve that this morning. How's it looking for you now?

SchwKatze 1y ago

It's kinda sad the state of things where startups with only buzzwords and slop (I'm looking at you horoscope AI app) end up raising more money than actual tech projects that will, actually, improve infrastructure and innovation.