A note on these reports. This is the third in something close to real time, written in the first days of the following month rather than reconstructed later. The figures are drawn from our Open Collective ledger, our Stripe account, the Savannah community export, our updates server and a handful of public sources, and prepared with the help of Claude. Where a number is a detection or an estimate rather than a measurement, I say so.
September was a quieter month on the surface and a better one underneath. The unrestricted operating balance more than doubled, from $1,765.86 to $4,261.30, helped by a sizeable contribution from the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, two Community corporate memberships and a broad spread of smaller sponsors and members landing together. The caution is the same one I have carried since July, no payroll invoices from Open Source Collective have been paid for three months now, so the month looks healthier than the underlying position really is.
The money
Income
Income for September was $8,148.90, our strongest month since the spring and well up on August’s $2,432.05. It came from a wide base rather than one source.
The largest single line was $2,030.00 through GitHub, and almost all of it, $2,000, was a contribution from GitHub closing out our financial support from the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, with the remaining $30 our usual small monthly sponsorships. We are grateful both for that support and for everything we learned through the programme, and it is a welcome one-off boost rather than a change in our underlying recurring income.
On the membership side, two organisations took Community corporate memberships, permanent.de renewing at $1,200.00 and open.de joining as a new member at $1,200.00. The Mautic World Conference continued to draw support, with sponsorships from Bloomidea (about $1,355) and Stepin Solutions (about $330) alongside a handful of ticket sales ($783.57), around $2,469 in all and ring-fenced to the conference fund. Two gifts to the reserve fundraiser added $350, our monthly sponsors contributed $687.00 between them, and two individual members renewed their yearly $100 memberships.
Expenditure
Ordinary spending was $2,480.90. Our freelance marketing support was $721.16, the Open Collective platform host fee was $697.76, and payment processing fees across Stripe and Open Collective came to $344.18. Administrative support was $307.84, our infrastructure and tooling $302.87, and the certification remittance to our delivery partner for August’s exams was $105.00, with the balance a few small bank charges.
No invoices for salary costs were paid in September. As in the two months before it, our payroll invoice from Open Source Collective has been deferred until we have the cleared funds to cover it, so July, August and September are now all outstanding. That is why a reported surplus of $5,668.00 for the month is not the whole story.
Where we stand
The reconciled net for the month was a surplus of $5,668.00, which ties exactly to the movement across our accounts, Open Collective up $4,778.97 and Stripe up $889.03.
Total cash across every account closed at $22,969.64, but as always most of that is ring-fenced and cannot fund day to day operations.
The conference fund holds $10,840.17, the product team account $2,219.16 (reserved for infrastructure costs and ‘keep the lights on’ expenses), and a spread of initiative and team funds a further $5,649.01.
The unrestricted operating balance is the $4,261.30 in the main collective. That is a real improvement on August, and it is still thin set against three months of deferred wages.
Our community
Contributions are never only code. Much of what keeps Mautic moving is documentation, translation, design, triage, review, support and the running of events, and September was a strong month for that broad participation.
New members and contributors
51 people joined the community in September, more than double August’s 24, a 112.50% increase. We welcomed 18 new contributors, up 38.46% on the month, and active contributors rose 23.19%, with 55 people contributing during September. After a slower late summer, this is the most encouraging community read we have had in a while.
Most active organisations
The organisations driving the most activity this month were:
- rectorphp (415, ⬇️ 13.54%)
- Acquia (144, ⬆️ 34.58%)
- UpScale (108, ⬆️ 620%)
- Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (94, ⬆️ 30.56%)
- Sales Snap (37, ✨ New entry)
- moorwald (28, ⬆️ 211.11%)
- Twentyzen (24, ✨ New entry)
- Aivie (14, ⬇️ 57.58%)
- acolono GmbH (14, ⬆️ 40%)
- Dropsolid (13, ⬇️ 59.38%)
The rectorphp name is Tomas Votruba, a volunteer who uses his own Rector tool to cut away technical debt in the codebase, so it reads as an organisation in the data but is one person’s sustained effort.
Top contributing organisations
By volume of merged and accepted contributions:
- Acquia (252, ⬆️ 1.61%)
- rectorphp (250, ⬇️ 11.97%)
- UpScale (136, ⬆️ 209.09%)
- Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (81, ⬇️ 21.36%)
- Aivie (40, ⬆️ 66.67%)
- Sales Snap (22, ⬆️ 1000%)
- Axelerant (20, ✨ New entry)
- acolono GmbH (11, ✨ New entry)
- Dropsolid (11, ⬇️ 65.63%)
- GiadaWare (4, ✨ New entry)
Most active individual contributors
Setting aside automated accounts and project staff, the most active individuals were:
- Tomas Votruba (415)
- Ayu Adiati (197)
- John Linhart (134)
- Martin Vooremäe (108)
- Margareth Egbuchulam (51)
- Patryk Gruszka (38)
- Alexander Zlobin (37)
- Ekke Guembel (33)
- Sven Döring (28)
- Dirk Spannaus (24)
Top individual contributors
By accepted contributions:
- Tomas Votruba (250)
- John Linhart (229)
- Ayu Adiati (190)
- Martin Vooremäe (136)
- Patryk Gruszka (54)
- Rahul Shinde (36)
- Alexander Zlobin (22)
- Jitesh Khatwani (20)
- Miroslav Fedeleš (13)
- Nico Grienauer (11)
Adoption and usage
Trial signups
We recorded 314 trial signups in September, a shade up on August’s 307 and close to the steady low-to-mid 300s the year has settled into.
Interest remains strongly international. By region, Asia led with 122, then Europe with 80 and North America with 43, followed by Africa (28), South America (26), Oceania (8) and the rest (7).
India (84), the United States (38), Brazil (18), the United Kingdom (14) and Germany (13) were the top countries.
Versions and environments
Our updates server recorded 6,881 instances checking in during September. These counts are a last-check-in measure, so the most recent month always looks fullest and earlier months thin out as instances re-check-in later, which means they are best read as a floor rather than a precise census.
Mautic 7 adoption continued to climb, reaching 56.0% of checking-in instances, up from 46.5% in August, with Mautic 5 at 14.1%, Mautic 6 at 13.0% and Mautic 4 at 9.2%.
The great majority of installs, 90.8%, use our built-in installer, with Docker at 4.9% and the remainder spread across DDEV (mostly testers), Softaculous and others.
On PHP, 49.7% run 8.3 and a further 33% are on 8.1, 8.2, 8.4 or 8.5, while about 14% remain on 7.4 or older. Almost everything, 98.4%, runs on Linux.
The wider footprint
BuiltWith detected 30,857 live Mautic sites at the start of October, with a further 128,599 recorded as expired, of which 2,123 sit in the top one million sites and 33 in the top ten thousand. This is detection data, so it captures sites whose Mautic can be fingerprinted via the tracking script, rather than every installation, and a site can be missed for perfectly ordinary reasons such as blocking bots, maintenance periods or other temporary outages. On GitHub, OSS Insight reports the mautic/mautic repository at 10,632 stars and 3,481 forks as at early October.
Looking ahead
September steadied us without solving anything. The operating balance is healthier, the community is growing again, and the conference is beginning to show in the numbers.
Against that, three months of deferred repayment of employment costs remain the pressing issue, and as such we have reduced my paid hours from three days a week to half a day a week. Fortunately I have recently started a paid fractional contract at two days a week, so I will be continuing to volunteer the additional 2.5 days a week to provide some continuity while we navigate these challenges.
If you would like to support the great work happening across Mautic, membership and sponsorship are the most direct ways to help, and every contribution of time, code or care is what this report is really a record of.
I would love to hear what you make of these reports, and what you would like to see in them. You can always reach me through the community channels.
