Open Startup Report #39 – May 2026

A photo of tulips in different colours with a blurred background

Note: The February to June reports are being back-dated, written in July 2026, as I have been out on sabbatical. I’m experimenting with using Claude (thanks to their 6 months free gift to open source maintainers!) to help automate some of the very time consuming parts of creating these reports, but they are still reviewed by human eyes before publishing. If you spot anything unusual, please do let us know.

What carried the project this month was not large donations, but a quieter kind of support that passes back and forth between us and the wider ecosystem we belong to, the ordinary, reciprocal relationships that keep an open source project standing.

Key points

May was a quieter month financially, and a healthier-looking one for it. The largest single piece of income was a revenue share from the Mautic trials that Dropsolid run on our behalf, returned to the project. We also welcomed three new corporate members, and paid our first contributor bounty this year on an issue which several people had contributed small amounts to get fixed.

One honest caveat carries over from April. There was again no employment cost recorded this month as the invoices weren’t approved for payment, so both April and May now carry a payroll expense that is still to land. The surplus you will see is real on the page but flattered by that timing, so we need to bear this in mind.

Finances

May was a steadier, smaller month, and a welcome one after April’s lopsided figures. Income was $8,790.95 and expenditure was $2,943.60, leaving a surplus of $5,847.35. As in April, that surplus is misleading as we have deferred costs, because there was again no employment expense approved for payment this month. April and May both now carry a payroll cost still to come, so please read the surplus with that in mind rather than as spare capacity.

The shape of the income is what I find heartening. The largest line, $3,613.95, is a share of revenue from the Mautic trials that Dropsolid operate for us, passed back to the project. It is a mutual arrangement, a partner earning alongside us and returning a portion, and it is becoming a meaningful and welcome stream. Alongside it, three organisations took out Community corporate memberships – two renewals from Data Innovation SL and GE Mission along with a new signup from Clarovant Digital totalling $3,600 – and our community sprint in Berlin kept drawing registrations.

39 3 expenditure breakdown

Income for May

SourceAmount
Trials revenue (Dropsolid)$3,613.95
Corporate membership, Community$3,600.00
Monthly sponsors$755.00
Fundraiser$500.00
Individual members$162.00
Community sprint (Berlin)$160.00
Total$8,790.95

Monthly sponsors combines our recurring Open Collective sponsors with GitHub Sponsors. The community sprint line is registrations to join us in Berlin plus a contribution to sponsor the sprint.

On the spending side, with employment deferred, the month was light. One line I am glad to see is our first contributor bounty, $80 paid to a community member for fixing some issues with the GrapesJS landing page builder. Rewarding people for the work they do for the project, in whatever form it takes, is something I would like us to do more of. We have a balance of just over $700 currently available for supporting bounties, so be sure to chat with team leads if you’ve got a task you’d like to see compensated.

Expenditure for May

CategoryAmount
Open Collective host fee (10%)$859.19
Freelancers$700.00
Admin support$525.75
Payment processor fees$440.42
Infrastructure and tools$324.99
Bounties$80.00
Other$13.25
Total$2,943.60

The payment processor fees roll up Stripe at $199.10, GiveWP at $10.00, and Open Collective’s own processor fees at $231.32. There is no employment line this month, deferred as noted above.

39 3 expenditure breakdown 1

The full cost of collecting our income came to $1,299.61, most of it the Open Collective host fee.

39 4 cost of collection

Set against expenditure, May closed comfortably in the black, with the deferred payroll the honest asterisk on that.

39 1 income vs expenditure

Contributions

This was an encouraging month for our contributor community, particularly among new joiners. We welcomed 41 new community members, up 2.50%, and 15 new contributors, a strong rebound of 66.67% after April’s dip, with active members also up 9.33%. It is worth saying, as always, that contributions to Mautic take many forms beyond code, from documentation, translation and design to triage, review, support and helping run our events, and all of it counts here.

Most active organisations

OrganisationActivityChange
Acquia208↑ 82.46%
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing123↑ 33.70%
Dropsolid32↓ 11.11%
UpScale15↓ 68.75%
Aivie12↓ 60%
enable.services12new entry
Stefan Franz10new entry
Druid10new entry
NrohoOrg7new entry
Moorwald, Sven Döring5↓ 83.87%

Top contributing organisations

OrganisationContributionsChange
Acquia150↑ 54.64%
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing74↑ 80.49%
Dropsolid40↑ 29.03%
UpScale20↓ 25.93%
Aivie15↓ 11.76%
NrohoOrg5new entry
enable.services3new entry
Webmecanik2↓ 66.67%
Crafting.email1new entry
Casfer1↓ 66.67%

Acquia and Leuchtfeuer both stepped up their contributions markedly, and it is good to see newer names such as enable.services and NrohoOrg appearing in the rankings. A widening circle of organisations taking part is one of the surest signs of a healthy project.

39 7 top orgs

Most active individual contributors

ContributorActivity
John Linhart181
Ayu Adiati159
Patryk Gruszka82
Anderson José Eccel32
Ekke Guembel21
Rohit Pavaskar19
Margareth Egbuchulam17
Achilles Poloynis17
Martin Vooremäe15
Predrag Vukovic14

Top individual contributors

ContributorContributions
Ayu Adiati156
John Linhart103
Anderson José Eccel40
Patryk Gruszka37
Predrag Vukovic26
Rohit Pavaskar23
Lukáš Drahý23
Martin Vooremäe20
Miroslav Fedeleš20
Rahul Shinde14

We welcomed 15 new contributors this month, and I am grateful to each of them. As always, I have kept these rankings focused on our volunteer community, setting aside automated accounts and staff activity.

Usage of Mautic

Interest in trying Mautic eased a little, with 348 trial signups in May against 392 in April, still a healthy level. India led again, followed by the United States and Brazil, with Morocco, Pakistan, France, Canada and Germany all featuring. The steady global spread of people reaching for an open source path is one of the things I find most encouraging month to month.

Composer installations of Mautic through Packagist were 90 in May, easing back from April’s 134, which tends to move around month to month with release activity.

39 6 trials countries

Community health

The clearest signal this month is the rebound in new contributors, up more than 66% after a quiet April, alongside a widening set of organisations taking part. Contribution activity from our leading organisations rose sharply, and a healthy spread of newer names appeared in the rankings. New joiners and returning contributors together suggest the routes into our community are open and working.

It’s also great to see funds coming in from the Dropsolid partnership running our trials and managed hosting, and that we’re able to support contributors via our bounty program.

Conclusion

May reminded me that a project like ours is held up less by grand gestures than by steady, reciprocal relationships, a partner sharing revenue, organisations renewing their support, contributors giving their time, and people paying a little to gather in Berlin. None of it is dramatic, and all of it matters.

If you would like to be part of the web of support that carries Mautic through its quiet months as well as its loud ones, becoming a project member is the most direct way, and I would love to hear what this report brings up for you – use the connected forum thread to reply.

References

Open Source Collective (2026) Mautic collective transactions ledger, May 2026. Available at: https://opencollective.com/mautic

Packagist (2026) mautic/core-lib download statistics. Available at: https://packagist.org/packages/mautic/core-lib

Savannah CRM (2026) Mautic monthly community report, May 2026. Available at: https://savannahcrm.com/public/report/493b4bfc-1aa4-462e-852b-3158fc730a3f/

Stripe (2026) Mautic payment records and balance report, May 2026. Internal account data.

Mautic (2026) Trial signup submissions, May 2026. Internal form data.

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Sīlavāpi Cheesley

Sīlavāpi (ex Ruth) is an Open Source advocate with over 18 years of experience using and contributing to many different projects. Having served on the Community Leadership Team of the Joomla! project and built a full-service digital agency, she now works as Project Lead for Mautic, supporting the community who build and maintain the world’s first Open Source Marketing Automation platform. Sīlavāpi is an ordained Buddhist in the Triratna Buddhist Order. She's a lover of cats, a keen triathlete and flautist (but not at the same time!) and is based in the East of England.

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