Note: This is the second report written in something close to real time since I returned from 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.
August has always been a quiet month due to folks taking time out for holidays, and this year is no difference. We’ve got another month where we’re behind with outgoing payments and chasing our tail to pay those we have already deferred, so this dominates the financial positioning.
Key points
On the figures I have so far, income for August was around $2,095 and ordinary spending around $1,041, which would leave a modest surplus of roughly $1,050. That surplus is not real in any lasting sense. No reimbursement invoices for wages paid have been paid out this month, and the deferred pay from July and August is still waiting, so the true monthly cost of the project is not in these numbers yet.
The month brought no new corporate membership, but it did bring a conference sponsorship, another certification, and a handful of individual members and fundraiser gifts still arriving. There was also a $10,000 payment from Leuchtfeuer that I am setting aside, because it is an old auto renewing subscription that was refunded promptly, rather than income.
On the community side it was a genuinely encouraging month. New contributors were up 62.50% and new members up 14.29%, and the number of people actively taking part rose as well.
Finances
Let me deal with the $10,000 first, because it is the largest thing to hit the accounts and it is not ours to keep. On 15 August an annual $10,000 contribution from Leuchtfeuer arrived through Open Collective. It is an auto renewing subscription that was never cancelled, not a fresh gift, and the identical thing happened in August 2025 when the same charge came in and was refunded a week later. This year the refund was processed promptly, on the same day the charge landed, and they are cancelling the subscription so it cannot recur. I have excluded it from every figure below, but wanted to mention it in case the eagle-eyed of our readers notice it in the Open Collective transactions.
Set that aside and the underlying month was small and steady. On the figures to date, income was about $2,095, made up as follows.
Income for August
| Source | Amount |
|---|---|
| MautiCon sponsorship, Ecosystem partner | $675.05 |
| Monthly sponsors | $610.00 |
| Individual members | $500.00 |
| Fundraiser | $160.00 |
| Certification | $150.00 |
| Total | $2,095.05 |
The conference sponsorship is an Ecosystem partner package for the Mautic World Conference 2026, taken by emailexpert, settled at $675.05, and it is good to welcome them as an ecosystem partner for this year’s event.
Monthly sponsors is our recurring Open Collective base, among them Aivie, Dropsolid, Sales Snap, Hostnet, Ferienhausmiete.de and e-tailors Europe, together with our GitHub Sponsors payout.
Individual members combines four yearly memberships taken through Open Collective with one taken through Stripe.
The fundraiser line is three donations still trickling in from earlier in the year, and certification is a single Mautic 6 Developer Certification taken through Stripe, of which most is passed to our delivery partner with the remittance falling the following month.
There is no employment line again this month. July’s wages were not paid, and August’s have not been paid either, so on a cash basis nothing lands here. That is the single most important caveat in this report. Two months of pay are now deferred, and when they are settled they will land together and turn a run of light months into a heavy one, exactly as happened in June.
Expenditure for August
| Category | Amount |
|---|---|
| Freelancers | $700.00 |
| Infrastructure and tools | $138.79 |
| Payment processor fees | $100.97 |
| Open Collective host fee (10%) | $101.00 |
| Other | $0.70 |
| Total | $1,041.46 |
Freelancers is Barsha Devi’s July invoice. Infrastructure and tools is our usual set, hosting with Infomaniak, Savannah, Mailfloss, n8n, Supabase, HubSpot and GitHub. The payment processor fees roll up Open Collective’s processors and Stripe. There is a committed cost not shown here, the $210 certification remittance due to our delivery partner, which is recorded as an Affiliate payout when it is paid.
On the Stripe side the month reconciles cleanly. Stripe opened August at $1,000.89, took $1,085.05 across six charges, carried $38.52 of processing fees, swept $1,038.99 across to Open Collective in a single payout, and closed at $1,008.43. The Stripe charges are the EmailExpert sponsorship, the certification, one individual membership and the three fundraiser gifts.
So the provisional picture is a small surplus of about $1,050, which I would ask nobody to take comfort from. It exists only because the largest cost, our wages, has not been paid. The honest reading of August is a month where recurring income was around $1,100 against recurring running costs of around $1,050 before any wages at all, which is roughly break even on the lights but nowhere near covering the work.
Cash and fund position
This month I want to show the shape of what we hold as well as what came in and went out, because the two tell very different stories. We keep our money across a number of accounts on Open Collective, and most of it is ring-fenced, meaning it is set aside for a specific purpose such as the conference or a particular team, and cannot be spent on day to day running of the project. Only the main collective is unrestricted, general operating money.
| Fund | Balance | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Main collective | ~$215 | Unrestricted, general operating |
| Mautic World Conference 2026 | $8,534 | Ring-fenced for the conference |
| Product Team | $2,630 | Ring-fenced for infrastructure costs (due to the virtual card being associated with this project) |
| Initiative, team and event funds, combined | ~$5,854 | Ring-fenced |
| Total across all funds | ~$17,233 |
The figures exclude the Leuchtfeuer $10,000 discussed above, since that was refunded, and the main-collective figure will firm up once the full-month Open Collective ledger is in.
Our total cash of about $17,233 looks reasonably comfortable, but the money actually available to keep the project running from day to day is only around $215.
Everything else is earmarked, for the conference, for the product team, and for a spread of smaller initiative, team and event funds, and it would not be right to spend it on general operations. It is a true picture of a project whose committed funds are healthy but whose free operating cash is very thin, and it is the clearest single reason that building our recurring membership income matters so much.
Contributions
A reminder that contributing to Mautic is far more than code. Documentation, translation, design, triage, review, forum and Slack support, and running events all count, and the figures below reflect that mix.
Drawn from our Savannah community report for August, we welcomed 24 new members, up 14.29% on July, and 13 new contributors, up 62.50%, a real lift after a couple of softer months.
The number of actively participating members rose 17.20%.
These are on the Savannah monthly report basis, the same public report we share in the community shoutout.
The full member and contributor export CSVs were not available when this draft was written, so I have not recomputed the export basis figures used in last month’s report, and I will reconcile the two once the export is to hand.
Most active organisations
| Organisation | Conversations |
|---|---|
| rectorphp | 480 |
| Acquia | 107 |
| Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing | 72 |
| Aivie | 33 |
| Dropsolid | 32 |
| UpScale | 15 |
| Webmecanik | 11 |
| acolono GmbH | 10 |
| Friendly | 10 |
| moorwald, sven döring | 9 |
Top contributing organisations
| Organisation | Contributions |
|---|---|
| rectorphp | 284 |
| Acquia | 248 |
| Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing | 103 |
| UpScale | 44 |
| Dropsolid | 32 |
| Aivie | 24 |
| Webmecanik | 6 |
| Mithtech-Bengaluru | 4 |
| enable.services | 3 |
| Sales Snap | 2 |
The rectorphp name at the top of both tables is Tomas Votruba, a human volunteer who uses his Rector tool to clear technical debt across the codebase, so the activity is real community work supported by AI, rather than an automated account.
Most active individual contributors
| Contributor | Conversations |
|---|---|
| Tomas Votruba | 480 |
| John Linhart | 103 |
| Patryk Gruszka | 32 |
| Santhi Prakash | 29 |
| Rahul Shinde | 28 |
| Anderson José Eccel | 27 |
| Peculiar C. Umeh | 26 |
| Achilles Poloynis | 25 |
| Sarah Wimberley | 17 |
| Martin Vooremäe | 15 |
Top individual contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Tomas Votruba | 284 |
| John Linhart | 235 |
| Patryk Gruszka | 50 |
| Martin Vooremäe | 44 |
| Anderson José Eccel | 32 |
| Lukáš Drahý | 26 |
| Rahul Shinde | 22 |
| Peculiar C. Umeh | 18 |
| Santhi Prakash | 11 |
| Leon Oltmanns | 10 |
The individual tables exclude automated accounts and project staff.
A warm welcome to our new contributors this month, among them Manoj, JoTalbot, Tom, Jure Sah, trung, Vijay Misal, Jan Kahmen, Pavel Aleksandrov, DefiDevDan, Vaibhav Srivastava, Brynn Bendixen, Manuel Christlieb and Alexander Zlobin.
Usage of Mautic
Our hosted trial signups came to 307 for the full month, down from 373 in July and the quietest month of the year so far, having sat between 348 and 392 every other month of 2026. It is only one month, so I would not read a trend into it yet, but it is worth keeping an eye on. Interest remains broad, led by India and the United States, then Brazil, Germany and China, with the strongest regional weight in Asia and Europe.
On the update server, 6,147 instances checked in during August, up from 4,402 in July when both are read from this same export. A note of caution on that comparison, the figure is on a last check-in basis and the most recent month always looks fullest, because an instance that checked in earlier in the year and has since checked in again has moved its date forward, so earlier months are steadily depleted. It undercounts the real installed base and is best read as a floor.
Version adoption continues its steady shift towards the current release. Among instances checking in during August, Mautic 7 accounts for 46.5%, Mautic 5 for 20.2%, Mautic 6 for 16.6% and Mautic 4 for 12.0%, with a small tail on Mautic 3 and older. That is a modest gain for Mautic 7 on July.
Most installs use the built-in installer at 87.8%, with Docker at 7.1% and the remainder spread across Softaculous, DDEV and a long tail of methods. On the platform underneath, PHP 8.3 leads at 48.2%, followed by 8.2 at 18.9%, and about 14% of instances are still on PHP 7.4 or older, which is worth watching as those versions age out of support. Almost everything runs on Linux, at 98.6%.
Community health
GitHub standing via OSS Insight reads 8,992 stars and 3,305 forks as at the start of September. Beyond the raw numbers, the shape of August was healthy, a wide spread of organisations and individuals taking part across code, review, triage and support, and a strong intake of new contributors.
Conclusion
August is the second quiet month in a row. Our recurring income does not yet cover our running costs, let alone the work, and the wages that make up most of our real cost have not been paid for two months now. That deferral is the thing holding the accounts level, and it is not a position we can hold indefinitely. What gives me heart is the community itself, more new contributors and members than last month, and a broad base of organisations still showing up to build Mautic together.
The work of the coming months is to turn that goodwill into a steady recurring base and to face the shape of our ongoing costs so that we can take action going forward, as the current position is unsustainable. If you would like to help build the steady base that makes quiet months genuinely quiet, becoming a project member is the most direct way.
References
Open Source Collective (2026) Mautic collective transactions ledger, to 15 August 2026. Available at: https://opencollective.com/mautic
Stripe (2026) Mautic payment records and balance report, to 31 August 2026. Internal account data.
Savannah CRM (2026) Mautic community monthly report, August 2026. Available at: https://savannahcrm.com/public/report/0e58a9ab-4b0a-43af-8f29-e1c59c7d79be/
BuiltWith (2026) Mautic technology trends, retrieved via the BuiltWith API, 1 September 2026. Available at: https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Mautic
OSS Insight (2026) mautic/mautic repository analysis. Available at: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/mautic/mautic
