September 02, 2025
Zig Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization which I am proud to say makes extremely efficient use of monetary resources. Unlike many of our peers, our primary expense is direct payments to contributors for their enhancements to the Zig project.
Don’t take my word for it - let’s look at some numbers.
2024 Expenditures
| Expense Name | 2024 Cost | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Contractors | $306,362.09 | Direct compensation to contributors working on Zig at a rate of $60/hour. |
| Employees | $154,263.32 | ZSF has one employee which is yours truly, Andrew Kelley, serving the role of Lead Software Engineer. In 2024, I also volunteered my time as President of Zig Software Foundation, volunteered as Accounting Clerk, and volunteered as Development Director. In the future, it would be nice to have dedicated staff for these roles so that I could focus more on being Lead Software Engineer. |
| Accounting | $18,463.62 | This is entirely paying our accountant, Strada Financial Group, to keep the American legal system happy and keep our organization tax-exempt. I suspected we were being overcharged, and in 2025 switched to a different accountant. |
| CI & Website | $14,986.73 | Zig has great cross-compiling abilities in part due to investing in testing infrastructure for different systems. Some of these costs were one-time costs to purchase machines that sit in our homes and offices while others are market-rate Hetzner bare metal machines that we run GitHub Actions on. |
| Taxes | $13,089.07 | Although ZSF is a tax-exempt organization, employees are still required to pay income tax. |
| Travel | $6,955.61 | In a 2024 meeting, the board decided that the previous year's travel budget successfully helped grow Zig adoption, and retained the same budget of $15,000. In 2024, ZSF spent $6,956 of those allocated funds, increasing Zig's presence in Italy and Germany. |
| Sponsorships | $5,846.24 | The Zig project is mostly comprised of in-house code, however, it also relies on third party projects. Today, every Zig installation includes some source files or ported code from musl libc, mingw-w64, and others. ZSF donates money to these projects as a way to say thanks, give back to the ecosystem, and increase the sustainability of Zig's dependencies. |
| Bank Fees | $782.23 | This is a tiny slice of the pie, but every time ZSF wires money, there is a transaction fee. Our contractors graciously bill infrequently when possible to help reduce this cost. |
| Total Expenses | $520,748.91 |
Even with a 13% bigger budget, we still managed to spend 92% of our money in 2024 paying contributors for their time.
Major Initiatives in 2024
So far so good. You can see we’ve been hard at work spending our esteemed donors’ money on advancing the mission statement.
However, if we look at the trend of donations over time for the year 2024, we see overall a slow decline. This is why we’re doing another fundraiser this year.
2024-2025 Donations Per Month
The big spike is half of Mitchell Hashimoto’s pledge.
More to the point, the second half will buy us another year to raise donations in order to keep our bank balance positive. ZSF neither borrows money nor invests money; we convert donations directly into progress on the Zig project.
2024-2025 Cash On Hand
Meanwhile, user activity continues to skyrocket. A rapidly increasing user base is adding Zig to their software stacks, filing issues, sending pull requests, asking for help, and shipping software that depends on Zig.
2024 GitHub Issues Per Month
The top line is Total Issues Opened and the bottom line is Total Issues Closed. The gap is widening - more users are demanding more attention than Zig core team has time for.
| Average time to close issues | |
|---|---|
| All Time | 7 months |
| Past Year | 11 months |
| Past Month | over 1 year |
| Average time to close pull requests | |
|---|---|
| All Time | 16 days |
| Past Year | 30 days |
| Past Month | 2 months |
Source: Repo Trends
Total GitHub Stars
Source: OSS Insight
In response to this rising demand, we added Alex Rønne Petersen to the Zig core team. Thanks to the income that was available to us in 2024, we were able to offer new contracts.
2024 Income
| Income Name | 2024 Amount | Description |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Sponsors | $170,656.04 | Zig on GitHub Sponsors. This category contains a numerous amount of individuals and companies - each less than $1000/month. We recommend those donating via GitHub Sponsors to switch to Every.org since they process receipts and are a non-profit organization themselves and are not in the process of neglecting their core product in the face of the AI boom. |
| Mitchell Hashimoto | $150,000.00 | A generous individual. While his family's donation has helped ZSF immensely in 2024 and will continue to do so in 2025, neither ZSF nor Mitchell himself wants him to be this large a slice of the pie! |
| Every.org | $90,097.45 | Every.org is a fellow 501(c)(3) non-profit that manages donation collecting for other non-profits. They've been good to us; it's our preferred method of receiving donations. This category is mostly individuals along with a few small donations from companies. |
| Bun | $60,000.00 | Bun is a fast JavaScript all-in-one toolkit. |
| TigerBeetle | $60,000.00 | TigerBeetle is a financial transaction database with 1000x faster OLTP performance, mission critical safety, and indestructible storage fault tolerance. |
| Benevity | $36,195.58 | They help us collect company-matched donations from employees. This category contains a number of individuals. |
| ZML | $33,000.00 | ZML offers high performance inference on any model for any hardware. |
| Mitchell Kember | $21,027.00 | A generous individual. |
| Individuals | $19,312.52 | This category contains many people who donated via paper checks or other miscellaneous ways. |
| Russel Simmons | $16,384.00 | A generous individual. |
| Blacksmith | $14,000.00 | Blacksmith is a dead simple, drop-in replacement that costs 75% less than GitHub runners. |
| Total Income | $670,672.59 |
However, with our current level of recurring income, we will not be able to renew everyone’s contracts, nor offer new contracts to Zig core team members.
A Plea for Donations
We have extremely talented Zig core team members who want to renew their contracts, and others who are interested to start getting paid for their valuable work for the first time.
In order to do this, we need more recurring donations. I for one do not enjoy asking for money, but in the interest of our users and contributors, it would be irresponsible not to.
Please sign up for a monthly donation if you can. Our preferred donation method is via Every.org. A fellow 501(c)(3) non-profit, they seamlessly manage gift receipts, and are not pivoting to AI like GitHub is currently doing.
More details including our EIN and address for paper checks
| Companies | Contact us to get your logo on ziglang.org in exchange for a monthly donation. |
|---|---|
| Employees | Check if your company matches donations to charities such as Zig Software Foundation. That 2x multiplier makes a huge difference. We're already in the system. |
| Venture Capitalists | We are aware of a few startups betting on Zig as their language and toolchain of choice to build tomorrow's critical infrastructure. Helping the Zig Software Foundation reach v1.0 faster is one of the most efficient uses of capital you can make to boost your portfolio. |
| Individuals | Can you spare $10 per month? This is our favorite kind of donation because it helps diversify ZSF's income, keeping us free from undue influence from any single party. If not, don't sweat it. We'll be OK. |
Huge thanks to all who graciously donate funds to our cause. Together we serve the users!
-Andrew