The Thunderbird email client celebrates the wave of donations

The Mozilla project behind the Thunderbird 2022 email client has received significantly more donations. More than 300,000 donors have given a total of $6,442,704. Not only is this a new record, but 2.3 times the amount donated in 2021, and 8.75 times the amount donated in 2017. At the time the project was starving, but now it’s financially secure. “This is amazing,” says Ryan, director of business development for Thunderbirds. Sipes in the project blog About the fundraising spree, “We are extremely grateful for the generous donations from our users.”

Mozilla Thunderbird does not get much income from sources other than donations. By the way, more than half of the annual income was paid only in December. Sipes attributes this to the first call for donations directly in the app. However, he wants to lay the foundation for the whole of 2022, through frequent blog posts, newsletters and daily use of social networks – which, since April 2022, Thunderbird’s presence in Mastodon he heard.

How much does Thunderbird spend on what?

And of course there was the release of Thunderbird 102 in late June. Thunderbird spent $3,569,706 in 2022, according to the Sipes report. Nearly 80 percent of this went to personnel costs — Thunderbird had 15 employees at the start of 2022, now there are 24. Roughly seven percent of expenses are attributable to administrative expenses, not six percent to bank charges for donations (3.2% of donations), a good five percent on services such as personnel management, legal and tax advice, and two percent on their IT .

The areas of investment are developing a new user interface, making fundamental architectural changes to the desktop version of Thunderbird and converting the popular K-9 email app for Android into Thunderbird for Android. Thunderbird will also soon put an iOS app on its roadmap. A similar employee will be appointed before the end of this year. Version 115 of the desktop client, called Supernova, is due to be released this summer.

At the same time, the project is looking for sources of income other than donations. But “new tools and services to increase productivity” are being worked on. In any case, the Thunderbird email client itself will remain free and won’t lose any performance advantages, Sipes promises.

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