BookStack in 2024

Dan Brown posted on the 6th of January 2025

As we cross over yet another year boundary we look back at the progress, maintenance and funding of the project for 2024 with a view of potential plans in 2025:

Project Funding

I’m happy to say funding of the project has continued to grow in 2024. In our 2023 post I mentioned general revenue (excluding taxes, costs etc…) has risen from £15k in 2022 to about £25.8k in 2023. In 2024 revenue totalled about £45.5k, so a significant revenue increase throughout the year! Here’s the breakdown:

Revenue from GitHub sponsors has grown to a monthly average of about £1.4k, providing a sizeable stable base of funding. Surprisingly, donations via Ko-Fi are down a bit on average, but are much more consistent compared to last year which reflects the increase of sponsorships and monthly donations via this method, yet fewer large one-off donations.

Our main source of revenue is from our support services, which have over doubled in average revenue compared to 2023, and for the first time have provided income across every month of the year! A number of “Enterprise Support Plan” sales have really helped boost this, along with a base of new and renewing “Professional Support Plan” customers.

Overall this means, even after business costs and taxes, I’m now more than covering my living costs with a little extra to spare and I can now comfortably look at giving back more or thinking about project growth plans, both of which I talk about more later on in this post.

Once again, a massive thanks to all those that have donated to or sponsored the project, as well as those that have purchased our support services. I am so grateful to be able to focus on open source work full time, and provide the project for free to anyone that finds it valuable, with no paywalls or barriers.

Sharing of Funds

Now that there’s some breathing room in the funding, I can now look to increase the financial support that gets forwarded on to the projects & services BookStack depends upon. This is something I started when initially accepting donations but, for the most part, I put further growth of this on pause in late 2021 when leaving my job to focus on BookStack full time.

After sorting my taxes a few months back (to ensure I still had some income left after paying the government) I started going back over our dependencies to cover those where donations are accepted, as well as increasing donations to many previously set-up sponsorships via GitHub. My monthly GitHub sponsors bill has increased from $90 in September, to $226 in December. Upon this, I’ve increased a few larger one-off donations to projects/people that don’t accept donations via GitHub.

The change in forwarded funding represents us “catching up” with this scheme to ensure our dependencies are covered, but I plan to still continue this and scale it up with revenue, increasing existing donations and adding new projects where needed.

New Features & Enhancements

Throughout 2024 we’ve published 4 feature releases, and 14 patch versions. The below list summarizes many of the most significant additions and changes made during these releases:

• New WYSIWYG editor (alpha)
• Portable ZIP import/export format
• WYSWIYG comment editor
• Video attachment stream support
• Commands-based PDF export option
• Browser opensearch support
• Licenses view
• Updated framework to Laravel 10
• Welsh language support
• Audit log API Endpoints

Looking over these, my personal favourite has to be the portable ZIP import/export format added in the last release, just due to the possibilities it can open up in regards to content portability and developer use.

Compared to previous years, this list really isn’t as long, but a big reason for this is down to the diverted effort in dealing with the licensing change to our core WYSIWYG editor. It’s disappointing to see fewer big new features across 2024, but I’m trying to view it in the more positive light, that we’re going into 2025 with a new core editor which we have a lot more control over to suit our future needs better.

There’s also the factor that as these years pass BookStack is becoming a more mature platform where stability and refinement take precedence over flashy new features.

Website Usage & Audience Reach

Looking at our website analytics for the year (which we track via self-hosted Plausible CE) visits & views have increased further by about 10 to 20 percent:

This is a similar increase to last year, and makes sense since I’ve again done almost no additional promotional work, outside of talking about BookStack on a couple of podcasts. It’s good though to see this steady growth remain despite fewer releases & new features this year, which has provided fewer opportunities for social posts, interaction and sharing.

Project Maintainership

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking more about how we can scale project maintenance. This has been particularly on my mind as I’ve added large chunks to the codebase this year, mostly via the new WYSIWYG editor and the added ZIP import/export format.

I don’t want to chase growth for the sake of growth, and scale out the project to as big as possible, but I do want to ensure we remain in a healthy state in regards to being sustainable and not over-encumbered with maintenance work alone. Also, as time goes on and more people rely on the project, it can be more important that there’s other people involved so that the bus factor is less of a concern.

Therefore I’m starting to think about how I can more actively engage other longer-term maintainers to help out with particular parts of the platform. The growing funding unlocks some extra options here, in potentially being able to pay others, but I just need to evaluate and understand the potential complications and requirements of going down that route.

Going into 2025

As mentioned above, this year I’ll be thinking about methods of potentially getting other maintainers involved.

With the new WYSIWYG editor added in 2024, that should hopefully mature quickly in 2025 to become the default option, and I’m excited about how we then evolve that core element with the extra control we have over the codebase.

In July we’ll hit the 10 year anniversary for BookStack which is quite the milestone. For this it’d be nice to refresh the project website which, despite many subtle changes, has remained much the same since the original release. It’d also be great to release a meaty new feature for that event, but we’d have to see how things pan out.

A Big Thanks

I mentioned it above, but I want to re-iterate a big thanks to all those that have donated, sponsored, or purchased official support from the project. These contributions have really helped ensure we’re sustainable in a healthy, free and open manner.

Also, thanks to all those that contribute in any non-monetary ways. Whether that’s contributing code, contributing translations, providing input/feedback/comments via issues or Discord, or even just sharing & talking about the project on social channels such as Reddit; all this helps so much.

A special thanks to those who spend their time to help out others within our communities. Tim, randi65535, Script, B1t5murf, ibanez450, root-node and thedoctor0814 are examples that come to mind, although I’m sure there’s many others that I’ve missed!

Header Image Credits:  Photo by Giles Laurent (CC-BY-4) - Image Modified