Updated v25.02 post time

[website] / content / blog / 2025 / bookstack-in-2024.md

+++
categories = ["News"]
tags = ["News"]
title = "BookStack in 2024"
image = "/images/blog-cover-images/cc-by-sa-4/eagle-giles-laurent.jpg"
author = "Dan Brown"
slug = "bookstack-in-2024"
draft = false
date = 2025-01-06T14:02:00Z
+++

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:

{{<toc>}}

### Project Funding

I'm happy to say funding of the project has continued to grow in 2024.
In [our 2023 post](/blog/bookstack-in-2023/) 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:


![Chart showing a monthly breakdown of revenue, split between KoFi, Support services and GitHub Sponsors](/images/2025/01/2024-finances.png)

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](https://www.bookstackapp.com/support/), 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](/blog/bookstack-release-v24-12/#new-importable-export-format),
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](https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/4908).
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](https://analytics.bookstackapp.com/bookstackapp.com?period=custom&keybindHint=X&from=2024-01-01&to=2024-12-31&comparison=previous_period) (which we track via self-hosted [Plausible CE](https://github.com/plausible/community-edition/)) visits & views have increased further by about 10 to 20 percent:

![Line chart showing website visitors over the year, compared to 2023, with the 2024 line tracking just above the 2023 line](/images/2025/01/2024-site-analytics.png)

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](/blog/project-update-september-24/#talking-on-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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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!

---
  
<span style="font-size: 0.8em;opacity:0.8;">Header Image Credits: &nbsp;<span>Photo by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:001_Wild_Golden_Eagle_and_Majinghorn_Pfyn-Finges_Photo_by_Giles_Laurent.jpg">Giles Laurent (CC-BY-4)</a> - Image Modified</span></span>