LibreOffice 26.8 is the first version to display a donation banner in the Launch Centre. This document explains the reasons behind this decision and provides information on The Document Foundation’s sustainability model.
All figures are taken from the financial statements of The Document Foundation Stiftung, based in Berlin, and have been published on the website for every year of the foundation’s existence since its registration.
TDF revenue in 2025
Total revenue amounted to approximately 2.2 million euros.
Of this, over 90 per cent comes from donations, and the remainder almost entirely from the sale of LibreOffice via Microsoft and Apple’s online stores, where the price is set to cover the costs of maintaining the applications on those platforms.
It is worth noting that the same versions available on Microsoft’s and Apple’s online stores can be downloaded freely – and therefore free of charge – from the LibreOffice website.
Over 90 per cent of donations come from private individuals, and less than 10 per cent from public bodies and companies. Therefore, although the suite is widely used by companies and public bodies, it is funded almost entirely by private individuals who contribute small sums according to their means.
How much did TDF spend in 2025
Total expenditure amounted to approximately 1.5 million euros.
Seventy-five per cent of this expenditure was allocated to staff salaries and social security contributions, as well as consultancy contracts. Today, the foundation employs 18 people, 11 of whom have contributed to software development or other related activities, such as quality control.
It is worth emphasising this proportion clearly. Three-quarters of the TDF’s expenditure goes on staff, and the largest share is accounted for by development work, community building and education on the themes of software freedom, open standards and digital sovereignty.
Donations are channelled into constructive activities, rather than administrative costs.
In the past, a significant proportion of development work was awarded to companies that submitted the best bid in response to a tender, but this strategy has changed, and it was decided to bring development expertise in-house so as to steer the software’s evolution and share knowledge with the community.
The surplus in 2025
The surplus is not left unused but is reinvested in the growth already underway: three developers were hired during 2026 and two more will be hired shortly. In addition, various marketing and community development projects are funded from the same source.
The foundation’s expenditure does not follow a uniform pattern relative to its income. The recruitment process takes months, and if income is received before new staff are hired, a surplus will arise that represents planned work rather than unspent money.
TDF also maintains reserves, with the aim of covering at least one year’s operating costs. This figure, of course, increases year on year.
For an organisation with a single predominant source of income, this represents a minimum target. Indeed, a foundation that employs 18 people and supports a community of thousands has obligations towards them that cannot be suspended if income from donations declines.
Why this banner, and why now?
TDF is in good financial health. However, when compared with similar projects, it is significantly underfunded.
Thunderbird, an open-source email client supported almost entirely by donations, received $10.3 million in 2024 – 19 per cent more than the previous year – from over 335,000 individual donors. The Wikimedia Foundation operates on an even larger scale.
LibreOffice has a user base comparable to or larger than that of Thunderbird and a more extensive source code, covering six applications, dozens of file formats and 120 languages, whilst generating revenue amounting to around one-fifth of Thunderbird’s.
The gap is significant because the market has changed. Most people compare LibreOffice with Microsoft 365, and this creates expectations regarding availability on the web, in the cloud and on mobile devices that a desktop-focused development effort is unable to meet.
TDF has published a roadmap for web, cloud and mobile development. Delivering this within a timeframe that keeps pace with market developments requires greater development capacity than current revenue can support.
The banner serves to partially bridge this gap. It appears in the Start Centre – the screen that appears when the suite is launched without any documents open – and is displayed periodically, for example at monthly intervals or following an update. The banner links to the donations page and does not appear anywhere else in the software.
What the banner is not
LibreOffice contains no adverts, does not collect telemetry data and does not require any account, subscription or activation. No features are reserved for paying users. The suite does not transmit documents to a remote service and does not require network access to function. LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative artificial intelligence features.
Maintaining each of these features incurs costs, as each represents a source of revenue that the foundation has chosen not to exploit.
Advertising-supported software is funded by attention; subscription-based software is funded by the ability to revoke access; and data-driven software is funded by surveillance. TDF has ruled out all three of these options, leaving only the possibility of donations.
The problem with companies
The imbalance between individual and corporate donations is a specific problem that the foundation would like to rectify.
Companies and public bodies deploy LibreOffice on a large scale — in some cases on tens of thousands of computers — and derive a direct commercial benefit from it. Under the terms of the Mozilla Public Licence v2, they have the right to do so, and no one intends to revoke this right.
Unfortunately, very few of these organisations contribute financially to the project. The result is that private individuals are, in effect, subsidising the infrastructure costs of organisations that have considerably greater resources than they do.
Organisations that rely on LibreOffice have at least three ways of supporting it. They can make a donation to The Document Foundation, or purchase an enterprise version from a company within the LibreOffice ecosystem that offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA), professional support and security updates for a period of between three and five years, or pay a company or an individual to develop specific features tailored to their needs.
All these methods support the software, but none is used on a scale that is even remotely comparable to what one might expect given the widespread adoption of the product.
In fact, during 2026, the average monthly number of LibreOffice downloads approached one million, and there were nearly 600 million visits to the website from which updates are downloaded. Based on these two figures, even a very conservative estimate puts the number of LibreOffice users worldwide at over 100 million.
