Open Startup Report #32 – October 2025

Photo in an autumnal woodland with lots of yellow and orange leaves on the floor, and a carved pumpkin with a smiling face in the foreground.

October has been an exciting month as the community gears up for our annual in-person conference, this year the Mautic World Conference is coming to the UK in London. I can’t wait to meet people there, and am really looking forward to an entire week of Mautic with our two-day online conference following the in-person event.

Our Council will also be meeting in November – the Council are the folk who oversee the project as a whole and have fiscal responsibility for the running of the project. Learn more about them on the Council page.

October can’t pass without a shoutout to the amazing team who are putting on Hacktoberfest in the Mautic Community. Last year we received over 350 expressions of interest in contributing to Mautic, and we’re seeing similar levels this year. Join us in #hacktoberfest on Slack to learn more! We welcome contributions in both code and low/no code areas, and at the start of the month we had over 100 tasks that were ready for contributors! Learn more about contributing in our Community Handbook.

We are continuing to monitor the financial stability of the project as we’ve had several months where our outgoings exceed our income and we don’t have huge reserves available to dip into. On the positive, it seems that the Mautic World Conference will make a small profit for the first time, which is great news!

Finances

Here is the breakdown of our finances for the month:

Description

Amount

INCOME

Mautic World Conference sponsorships

$6,506.56

Event tickets

$1,507.22

Trials revenue

$2,120

Monthly sponsors

$765

Individual memberships

$396.80

Total Income

$11,500.80

EXPENDITURE

Mautic World Conference

$13,914.01

Employee Payroll (August 2025)

$9711.76

Travel and expenditure

$1,610.58

Host Fee to Open Source Collective

$1,121.29

Contractor Invoice (Barsha Devi, Sept 2025)

$700.00

Admin support

$356.16

Payment processor fees

$496.21

Infrastructure

$220.64

Council in-person meeting room hire

$216.01

Refunds

$212.77

Domain Renewal

$74.72

Total Expenditure

$28,634.15

As we come up to the Mautic World Conference we’ve had several invoices for the catering, print media, team travel and accommodation which mean it’s been a heavy month for expenditure. We’ve also had some great successes with the sponsorship team, bringing in several new sponsors for the event – great job!

This month also saw some funds coming over from customers who’ve converted from a trial user to a managed hosting user, which means we receive a 40% revenue share for the first year, decaying each year thereafter.

As we shift more towards using Stripe, we need to find a better way to calculate payment processor fees as these are not generally represented in our accounting processes very clearly. I’ve shown the fees here as represented by Open Source Collective and via an export from Stripe including both the payment processor fees and the Stripe fees, but it’s quite a clunky process! If anyone would like to help with this, please reach out to me directly.

Celebrating our community

A big thank you to all the organisations who have contributed to Mautic in October!

These organisations are making Mautic and helping to grow our awesome community.

🔎 You can always take a look at the data for the last 90 days via this link: Mautic 90 Days Report and you can now view this month’s report here: Mautic | Monthly Report for October 2025!

⬆️ = Increase from last month
⬇️ = Decrease from last month

Most active companies

Acquia 122 (⬆️ 17.31%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 116 (⬆️ 14.85%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 96 (⬆️ 500%)

meritoo 46

Enable 32

Aivie 27 (⬆️ 8%)

UpScale 25 (⬇️ 56.90%)

EddieHubCommunity 25

Webmecanik 23 (⬇️ 66.18%)

Dropsolid 20 (⬇️ 72.60%)

Top contributing companies

Acquia 60 (⬇️ 10.45%)

Aivie 16 (⬆️ 14.29%)

UpScale 12 (⬇️ 67.57%)

meritoo 10

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 8 (⬇️ 20%)

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham 6

IIT Vadodara 6

Webmecanik 5 (⬇️ 68.75%)

Friendly 3

Moorwald | Sven Döring 2

Contributions are as defined here with the addition of Jira issues being closed as completed, GitHub Pull Request reviews and Knowledgebase articles being written or translated, which we track through Savannah’s API.

Want to appear on this list? Get contributing, and drop me a line with your company name, domain and the folk who work for you and we’ll make sure that you are attributed correctly! 

A big thank you also to all the individuals who are helping us build this awesome community! 🫶🏻 🙌🏻

Most active members

Ayu Adiati 142

Jo 133

Sven Döring 96

Ekke Guembel 94

John Linhart 93

Favour Chibueze 68

Ima-Abasi Effiong 47

Abi beniyal 47

Krzysztof Nizioł 46

Aaron Pedwell 46

Top contributors

John Linhart 30

Rahul Shinde 15

Ayu Adiati 14

Martin Vooremäe 12

Abi beniyal 12

Favour Chibueze 11

Krzysztof Nizioł 10

Aaron Pedwell 9

Rohit Pavaskar 7

Aditya Ray 6

Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖

Abi beniyal

Aaron Pedwell

Aditya Ray

Govind S Nair

Jay Shenkar

JasmineGift

Jo

Oladeji Oluwaseun

Grace Chibueze

Krzysztof Nizioł

Tolu Laleye

mkauschmann

knizio

Chidi Confidence

Top supporters

Achilles Poloynis 3

Favour Chibueze 2

Ayu Adiati 2

Jo 2

Martin Vooremäe 1

Ekke Guembel 1

Sven Döring 1

Rahul Shinde 1

Renato Carabelli 1

Gustavo Balduino 1

Supporters are folks who have had conversations with people directly before they make a contribution, so most likely helping with that process.

This month we had 15 new contributors 🚀 (⬆️ 36.36%) and 57 new members joining the community! 💖 (⬆️ 9.62%).

Community health

We saw a rise in GitHub Star count over the last few months – although this is in most cases a ‘vanity metric’ it’s positive to see a continuing growth in interest of Mautic.

github star count oct 26
Source: GitHub star count on mautic/mautic repository via https://ossinsight.io/

We’re also continuing to see a strong growth in PRs submitted to the Mautic GitHub repositories (which includes the core product and also our documentation resources), averaging well over 100 per month at times.

contributions github mautic oct 25
Source: Savannah CRM

Remembering that every pull request requires at least two reviewers, we’re also seeing a strong and consistent numbers of people who are taking the time to do reviews with around 60-80 new reviews each month – but we’re always needing more people to help with this, the more we have, the faster we can ship bug fixes and features! Check out our Contributor Handbook to learn how to get started.

contributions reviews mautic oct 25
Source: Savannah CRM

We’re seeing almost 18,000 websites which the builtwith.com bot is detecting as running Mautic tracking as at the end of October 2025 – the chart below shows a cumulative line showing all domains that have ever installed Mautic tracking (blue line) and those which are still deploying Mautic tracking (yellow line), by the month in which the tracking was first detected. This is quite a blunt instrument when it comes to estimating the number of active instances because one instance can have tracking on many – or no – domains, and also there are many reasons why the bot may not pick up the tracking script – so we use this data as a very rough approximation which probably under-reports quite significantly.

cumulative v active sites october 2025
Source: builtwith.com data

In terms of how people are installing Mautic, we’re seeing a pretty similar distribution, with a few naming quirks over time represented by upper and lower case versions of the same install source. It’s good to see the consistent use of DDEV in our stats, which is predominantly from developers and test environments running on local machines.

Note: As I am a bit late with these reports, the server reports are including data from November and up to 18th December.

install source
Source: Mautic updates server

In terms of the versions in use when a Mautic instance is updated, we are seeing more of the 3.x and 4.x Mautic instances being updated this quarter, but still just under 25% of sites are still running Mautic 4 (which is only supported under an Extended Long Term Support contract) and 9% are running Mautic 3 (which is unsupported since 2022). Spare a thought for the folks running Mautic 2, which has quite a lot of very serious vulnerabilities which have been widely reported and exploited for over 5 years now.

mautic versions
Source: Mautic updates server

On the positive side, over 50% of Mautic instances are on a currently supported version of Mautic.

Concluding thoughts

In my experience, October perfectly illustrates the investment required to sustain a global open source project. While our financial outgoings were significant due to conference preparations, they pave the way for our first profitable Mautic World Conference – a huge milestone for our sustainability.

The surge in new contributors that we experience during Hacktoberfest and the steady growth in PRs remind me that our community is our strongest asset. As we approach the Council meetings and the conference, our focus remains on converting this momentum into long-term stability – balancing our books, supporting our maintainers, and ensuring that every new contributor finds a home in Mautic.

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Ruth Cheesley

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. Ruth is a lover of cats, a keen runner and flautist (but not at the same time!) and is based in the East of England.

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