As we close the door on 2025, I’ve been reflecting on the concept of resilience. In the context of open source, resilience isn’t just about code stability or uptime; it’s about the ability of a community to look at hard realities and adapt without losing its soul.
December brought us a welcome moment of financial relief – a surplus driven by the generosity of our Corporate Members renewing their support. For this, I am deeply grateful. However, as I signalled in last month’s report, a single strong month cannot paper over the structural deficits we faced in the latter half of the year. The ‘hard truths’ I mentioned in November have now crystallized into decisive actions for our 2026 budget.
In this report, you will see the details of our new focus on extreme efficiency. We are making difficult operational sacrifices – including reducing leadership hours and suspending travel – to align our spending with our reality. We are choosing prudent stewardship over wishful thinking. My hope is that by pruning back now, we ensure Mautic remains a strong, independent vessel for the years to come.
Finances
December brought a much-needed influx of funds, ending the year on a positive note with income exceeding expenditure by nearly $6,000. This was primarily driven by significant contributions from Corporate Memberships, for which we are incredibly grateful.
However, a single strong month does not erase the structural challenges we identified throughout the latter half of 2025. To ensure Mautic remains stable and to rebuild our depleted reserves, we have had to take decisive action in our 2026 budget.
Transparency is core to our values, so I want to be clear about the changes we are implementing immediately to reduce our burn rate:
- Leadership hours: I will be reducing my time as Project Lead to four days a week.
- Hiring freeze: We have temporarily shelved plans to convert our support contractor to a full-time employee; Barsha will remain with us on a contractor basis.
- Travel suspension: We have removed all travel budget for the coming year.
We have also removed all non-necessary expenditure from the budget. These were not easy decisions to make, but they are necessary to align our operational costs with our current recurring revenue. The surplus from December is a helpful buffer, but our focus for 2026 must be on rigorous financial discipline. I’ll be sharing the full budget in the General Assembly in January – open to all members of Mautic.
Here is the breakdown of our finances for the month:
Description |
Amount |
|---|---|
INCOME |
|
Corporate members |
$17,183 |
Extended Long Term Support |
$1,500 |
Monthly sponsors |
$761 |
Trials revenue |
$342 |
Individual members |
$300 |
Total Income |
$20,086 |
EXPENDITURE |
|
Employment (October 2025) |
$9,893.26 |
Host fees |
$2,000.62 |
Contractors |
$700 |
Mautic World Conference |
$525.74 |
Infrastructure |
$400.76 |
Admin support |
$279.83 |
Travel |
$146.49 |
Payment processor fees |
$133.56 |
Domain renewals |
$107.28 |
Total Expenditure |
$14,187.54 |
While the headline figures show a healthy surplus for December, it is important to remember that Corporate Membership payments are typically annual. This income is not a monthly recurring figure; it is the cash flow that must sustain us through the quieter months ahead. We also have two deferred payments for employment related costs which must be made immediately to bring us up to date with our obligations.
The surplus you see here, therefore, is not ‘profit’ to be spent at this time. It is the essential runway that allows us to operate while we transition to this new, leaner budget.
We are also two months behind with our employment cost repayments to Open Source Collective which will need to be paid up early in 2026.
We are entering 2026 with a focus on extreme efficiency, but our ultimate goal remains to grow our recurring revenue enough to restore full capacity and travel. If Mautic is critical to your business, please consider how a Corporate Membership could help us get back to full strength. Find out more at https://mau.tc/membership.
Celebrating our community
A big thank you to all the organisations who have contributed to Mautic in December!
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 December 2025!
⬆️ = Increase from last month
⬇️ = Decrease from last month
Organizations
Most active companies
Acquia 139 (⬇️ 4.79%)
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 129 (⬇️ 26.70%)
Casfer 74 (⬆️ 393.33%)
Aivie 30 (⬇️ 40%)
Dropsolid 24 (⬇️ 63.08%)
Webmecanik 23 (⬇️ 64.06%)
Moorwald | Sven Döring 17 (⬇️ 82.47%)
Crafting.email 10
Druid 8
Northwynde 6
Top contributing companies
Acquia 64 (⬆️ 6.67%)
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 31 (⬆️ 342.86%)
Aivie 22 (⬇️ 4.35%)
Webmecanik 17 (⬆️ 112.50%)
Dropsolid 9 (⬆️ 28.57%)
meritoo 7
Casfer 4 (⬆️ 100%)
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham 1
UpScale 1 (⬇️ 75%)
Codeblock 1
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!
Individuals
Most active contributors
John Linhart 117
Patryk Gruszka 89
Renato 74
Ayu Adiati 42
Ekke Guembel 29
Rahul Shinde 23
Zdeno Kuzmany 18
Sven Döring 17
Jason Dainter 15
Achilles Poloynis 14
Top contributors
John Linhart 41
Patryk Gruszka 25
Rahul Shinde 22
Zdeno Kuzmany 17
Anderson José Eccel 9
krishna 7
Ayu Adiati 7
Krzysztof Nizioł 7
dzinesco 6
Saurabh Gupta 5
Welcome to our new contributors this month 💖
Marcus Balasch
dzinesco
José Fernandes
Christian Studer
BintHamzah
Top supporters
Rahul Shinde 1
taxi 1
Marko Korhonen 1
Gustavo Balduino 1
Achilles Poloynis 1
Ayu Adiati 1
John Linhart 1
Christian Studer 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 7 new contributors 🚀 (⬇️ 36.36%) and 38 new members joining the community! 💖 (⬇️ 22.45%).
Community Health
We’re continuing to see a steady growth in GitHub Stars which puts us on track to achieve the heady level of 10,000 stars by this time next year – I think we can get there sooner, don’t you?
We continue to have strong signup rates from the Mautic Trials, however I am growing concerned that the numbers have dropped significantly since the summer.
Checking our analytics, we can see that there’s also a slight drop (green line) in the number of visits to the Try Mautic signup page (in August we lost our analytics tracking for a few days due to a website update, hence the big drop).
Shown here also are visits to the download page for Mautic, in blue.
We’re seeing fairly similar trends across the other pages, including the managed Mautic and Mautic Hosting pages.
While we do expect a seasonal down-turn towards November-December, we’re going to be watching the data closely to ensure that they return to normal levels in the new year. The Marketing Team will also be keeping an eye more generally on our overall traffic and optimization.
Last month I shared some insights into the geographical breakdown of trial users by world region: Open Startup Report #33 – November 2025 – Mautic. This month, we’ll dig into company size and marketing tools currently being used.
Trial signups are primarily coming from small to mid size enterprise, however we also see some larger organisations taking out a trial, as outlined below. A small caveat being, people don’t always use factually correct information when filling out the form, which is worth bearing in mind.
In November we added a field to the signup form asking what marketing automation tool people were currently using, and the results have been most interesting. We’ve also added this to the download form, to see how the results differ.
58% of people, when asked, reported that they were not currently using any marketing automation tool – so we need to make sure that when we’re nurturing these people, we’re sending them useful information about how to get started with marketing automation.
Of the remaining who reported a tool being used, Active Campaign is the largest proportion at 28%, followed by SendInBlue/Brevo, Mailchimp and Hubspot. Unsurprisingly we also see quite a lot of RD Station, a popular tool in Brazil where we have a very large community.
Alongside these popular tools that service the small to mid market, we also see some signups for companies who are using some of the enterprise tools including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, and Marketo.
From those who selected ‘other’, these are the top platforms:
We will use this information to provide more valuable information to the organizations signing up, and the first session in our upcoming ‘Hands on with Mautic’ series will be specifically aimed at switching to Mautic from another marketing automation platform.
Also of interest is the kind of volume that organizations signing up are expecting to send. While we have a lot of smaller volume senders, there’s also around 10% of organisations who are ‘power users’, planning to send over 100,000 emails per month.
Concluding thoughts
In reviewing the data for December, what stands out to me is not just the volume of signups, but the intent behind them. Seeing that 10% of our new trial users are ‘power users’, potentially planning to send over 100,000 emails, and noting the clear migration from proprietary platforms like ActiveCampaign and Brevo, tells me that the market is hungry for what we offer. Digital sovereignty is becoming a business necessity for growing organisations.
We enter 2026 with a leaner budget, yes, but also with a clearer vision. The ‘extreme efficiency’ we are adopting is designed to protect the core of this project so that we can continue to serve the users who rely on us. We have the product-market fit; now we are doing the hard work to ensure our operational model is equally robust.
My question to you as we step into the new year is this:
If Mautic provides the independence your business relies upon, will 2026 be the year you invest in its future?
Whether through code, community support, or a Corporate Membership, your contribution is the fuel that will allow us to restore full capacity and drive the project forward. Now is the time to step up and ensure Mautic’s long term future stability.
