Annual General Meetings/2026/Treasurer's report

Detailed Reports

The fiscal year we legally must report on is 2025, i.e. from 01 Jan 2025 to 31 Dec 2025. See Official Financial Statement 2025.

The Foundation has made again a small surplus on the books. Which is in principle an optimal result: while a surplus is reassuring that the finances are sound, not being too big ensures that few money goes to taxes. However, this has been the result or mere chance: the Foundation holds most cash in EUR but shows numbers in GBP, and fluctuations between GBP and EUR influence the result almost the same size as the surplus. The biggest cost saver and mission critical is the support by Fastly and Equinix for the website that meant that most website expenses have gone down greatly amid rising effort to defend the website against AI scrapers and attackers. The Foundation is very grateful for the material support.

Turnover and Cost of Sales look as if they had substantially grown. What we see here is the positive impact of the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF). While the STF has paid in 2025 and does pay in 2026 the expenses for our website team to improve core software infrastructure for the internet, it shows both on the income side (STF payments) and the expenses side (payments to contractors) with about an equal amount.

The Foundation has decided to contract this team for another year, and this will bring the spending up in 2027 again without being directly backed by income from the STF or any other specific source. The appointment of a second Senior Site Reliability Engineer will have a similar impact on finances. Independently, the Foundation has received in this fiscal year a very generous Bitcoin donation, and this brings us as of now in the situation that the Foundation expects a huge surplus in FY2026 while still having to find the funding for 2027. At the same time, many people have encouraged OpenStreetMap to have a yearly fundraising drive.

This is the reason why there is a fundraising campaign this end of the year, and communications have to be well-shaped to convey the message that we prepare for 2027, carrying about a year of reserves as a fiscal safety measure.

Roland Olbricht