Blender's revenue was EUR 3,106,361 in 2024, and two columns in the report announcing it do not add up

Quick answer (September 2026). Blender Foundation booked income of EUR 3,106,361 in 2024, against EUR 2,553,392 in 2023, a rise of 21.7%. The full published series runs EUR 1,376,076 in 2020, EUR 2,133,449 in 2021 (as restated), EUR 2,170,250 in 2022, EUR 2,553,392 in 2023 and EUR 3,106,361 in 2024, which is 2.26 times the 2020 figure in four years. In 2024 it spent more than it received for the first time in the published record, booking minus EUR 73,853 to reserves. Every figure here is taken from the foundation's own five annual reports. No 2025 report has been published as of 5 September 2026.

Now the part that is not in any of the coverage.

I checked all fourteen financial columns printed across those five reports by adding up the line items and comparing the result to the total the foundation itself printed at the bottom. Twelve of the fourteen foot exactly, to the euro. The two that do not are both in the 2024 report. One of them is short by EUR 36,000, and that missing EUR 36,000 is the reason the 2024 report appears to show individual donations growing by 51% when the foundation's own previous report says the growth was 39%.

None of that is an accusation of anything. Blender Foundation publishes more than almost any organisation of its size is obliged to, and a twelve-out-of-fourteen record across five years of hand-assembled tables is good. But the numbers people are quoting from the newest report include one that the report's own arithmetic contradicts, so here is the whole set of books with the corrections shown.

Blender Foundation income, 2020 to 2024

Stichting Blender Foundation is a Dutch foundation based in Amsterdam. It publishes an annual report as a PDF at download.blender.org/foundation/, going back to 2020. All figures below are in euro and come from the income tables in those reports, using the most recently restated version of each year.

The 2024 line is the first negative reserve movement in the six years of accounts Blender has published. The 2020 report also carries a 2019 column, which shows income of EUR 958,281 and EUR 42,000 added to reserves, so the run of positive years goes back at least that far.

Cumulatively, across 2020 to 2024 the foundation added EUR 567,046 to reserves. The 2024 board report says that buffer is "below an acceptable level" and that the target is three months of cash flow. On 2024 spending of roughly EUR 3.18 million, three months is about EUR 795,000, so the stated target is around EUR 228,000 above where five years of accumulation has left it.

Where the money comes from

The story the foundation tells about 2024 is the small-donation line, and it is a real story. Generic small donations went from EUR 263,256 to EUR 618,785, a jump of 135.1%, taking them from 10% of income to 20%. That is the result of the "Join the 2%" campaign run on blender.org at the end of 2024. The report names the campaign and its theme but does not explain what the 2% refers to.

There is an accounting detail underneath it that matters and that no coverage mentions. The 2024 board report states that because the campaign promised donors the money would go to upcoming projects, the campaign results, minus regular donations, were booked into the next fiscal year. So the EUR 618,785 above does not include the bulk of the campaign it is usually credited to. Whatever was raised and deferred lands in 2025, in a report that does not exist yet. The 2024 deficit and the 2025 figure are both moved by that single decision.

The patron line going slightly backwards while every individual channel grows is the other real signal. Corporate patron money is flat to declining across two years now, and the foundation has said in three consecutive reports that convincing individuals to give is an action point.

The EUR 36,000 the 2024 report loses in its own comparison column

Every annual report prints the prior year beside the current one. In the 2024 report, the 2023 comparison column reads:

Those six lines add up to EUR 2,517,392. The printed total is EUR 2,553,392. The column is short by exactly EUR 36,000.

The 2023 report, published a year earlier, gives the same line as EUR 440,916, and 440,916 minus 404,916 is 36,000. Substitute the 2023 report's own figure and the column foots to the euro.

Three further checks all point the same way, which is why this is worth stating as a fact rather than a suspicion:

1. The percentage printed next to the number contradicts the number. The 2024 report prints "17 %" beside that line. EUR 440,916 is 17.27% of EUR 2,553,392, which rounds to 17%. EUR 404,916 is 15.86%, which rounds to 16%. The percentage was calculated from 440,916.
2. The total is unchanged. Both reports print EUR 2,553,392 for 2023. If the foundation had genuinely restated the line, the total would have moved with it.
3. Every other line in that column is identical across the two reports, to the euro.

So this is a transcription slip, 440 becoming 404, not a restatement. It has one consequence worth knowing, because it flatters the number people are most likely to quote:

• Individual donation growth as the 2024 report implies it: 612,402 against 404,916, plus 51.2%.
• Individual donation growth as the foundation's own 2023 report supports: 612,402 against 440,916, plus 38.9%.

Still a strong year. Just not the one the arithmetic in front of you produces.

The 2024 expense column is short by EUR 12,830

The same report's expense table has the same problem in the other direction. The 2024 expense lines sum to EUR 3,093,531 against a printed total of EUR 3,106,361, a gap of EUR 12,830.

The likely cause is visible in the table. Two adjacent lines carry an identical value:

Two unrelated categories landing on the same euro figure is possible but unlikely, and replacing one of them with EUR 112,438 would make the column foot exactly. I am not going to tell you which line is wrong or what the right number is, because the documents do not support that and the foundation has not published the underlying ledger. What can be said is that the column does not add up, that a duplicated value sits inside it, and that the "Sub total Staff and Grants" of EUR 2,713,107 in the same table does foot exactly, so the problem is confined to the lines below it.

For comparison, the same expense table's 2023 column foots to the euro across all sixteen lines, as do both columns in every earlier report.

The 2021 restatement that reversed the direction of 2022

This is the largest correction in the series and it has never been written up anywhere I can find.

The 2021 annual report published total income of EUR 2,341,896. The 2022 annual report, printing 2021 as its comparison column, gives EUR 2,133,449. That is EUR 208,447 removed, 8.9% of the year.

Almost all of it is one line:

The expense side moved to match, and two of those movements are more interesting than the income line:

• A corporate income tax line of EUR 65,007 appeared in the restated 2021 figures. The original 2021 report has no corporate income tax line at all. This is a foundation that turned out to owe corporation tax for a year it had already reported without any.
• The reservation for coming years was cut from EUR 564,000 to EUR 293,023, a reduction of EUR 270,977. The 2021 report had made a point of that reserve, explaining that 24% of income was being held back rather than the planned 12.8%. Restated, it was 13.7%, which is roughly the original plan.

Here is why any of that matters to a reader rather than an accountant. The restatement reverses the direction of the following year. Measured against the 2021 figure Blender originally published, 2022 income of EUR 2,170,250 is a 7.3% decline. Measured against the restated figure, the same 2022 is 1.7% growth. The 2022 report describes that year as income that "stabilised", which is a fair description of plus 1.7% and not a fair description of minus 7.3%. The word choice is only correct on the restated basis, and the restated basis appears for the first time in the same document.

The reclassification that breaks the Development Fund series

If you try to track "Development Fund, patron" across Blender's reports you will get a number that jumps for reasons that have nothing to do with donors.

Between the 2022 report and the 2023 report, two income lines were folded into others and stopped existing:

The arithmetic is exact in both cases. 1,073,684 plus 87,540 is 1,161,224. 48,694 plus 2,003 is 50,697. The Epic Mega Grant was folded into patron income, and Google Summer of Code into small donations. The totals for 2022 are identical in both reports, so nothing was gained or lost, but two things follow:

1. "Development Fund, patron" from 2023 onwards silently includes a one-off grant that the foundation itself had reported as a separate item for three years. The Epic Mega Grant was EUR 330,888 in 2020, EUR 334,609 in 2021 and EUR 87,540 in 2022, visibly winding down. It is now invisible.
2. The patron line's apparent 2021 to 2022 growth is an artefact. On the 2022 report's own presentation it goes 687,896 to 1,073,684, up 56%. On the 2023 report's presentation the same two years read differently again.

A similar move happened on the expense side in the same pair of reports. Chairman salary for 2022 was published as EUR 82,624 with a footnote saying it was 70% of the total wage, the other 30% being paid by Blender Studio. The 2023 report restates the same year as EUR 118,034, which is 82,624 divided by 0.70 to the euro, and takes exactly EUR 35,410 back out of a line renamed from "Blender.org costs" to "Non-dev staff costs". The two movements offset perfectly and the total does not change.

There is no profit line in any Blender annual report

This is the single most useful thing to understand about these documents, and it explains why the question "did Blender make money" is harder to answer than it should be.

In every Blender annual report, income and expenses total to the same number. That is not a coincidence and it is not a balanced budget. "Reservation for coming years" sits inside the expense column as the balancing item, so the totals are forced equal by construction. There is no net result, no surplus line, no bottom line anywhere in any of the five reports.

The consequence is that the reserve movement is the profit. When the 2024 report shows minus EUR 73,853 in a column headed Expenses, it is not reporting a negative cost, it is reporting a deficit, funded by drawing down the buffer. A reader scanning for a loss will not find one labelled as such.

It also means the reserve line absorbs every correction. The EUR 270,977 taken out of 2021's reservation in the restatement above is the same event as the EUR 65,007 tax bill appearing, plus the EUR 211,811 removed from patron income, netting out through the one line that is free to move.

Three claims in the 2024 report, checked

Since the arithmetic in the report needed checking, the prose deserved the same treatment. All three of these are from the chairman's message and board report in the 2024 annual report.

"The board accepts to book a loss in 2024, which is less than the profits booked over 2023." Correct. The 2024 deficit is EUR 73,853 and the 2023 surplus was EUR 130,506.

"Financially, 2024 saw an increase of donation income of almost 20%." The increase was 21.7%. The report understates its own result.

"More than half of the Foundation income now comes from individual donations." This depends entirely on what counts as individual, and the report's own table does not settle it. Adding the two lines the foundation labels as individual, Development Fund individuals at EUR 612,402 and generic small donations at EUR 618,785, gives EUR 1,231,187, or 39.6% of income. Adding Blender Market takes it to 43.9%. The claim only reaches 50.8% if you count everything that is not explicitly corporate, including the EUR 214,322 of "Other large donations", which are large and are listed separately from individuals precisely because they are not the same thing. The statement is defensible on the broadest reading and not on the report's own labels.

One more, which is a date rather than a claim. The board report in the 2024 annual report is signed "Amsterdam, June 2024", six months before the financial year it reports on had ended. The 2022 report is signed May 2023 and the 2023 report June 2024, so the pattern is the following spring. The 2024 report carries the previous year's date unchanged. The report was covered in the trade press in September 2025, so June 2025 is the plausible intended date.

The 87% that is not the 70%

The 2024 report introduces a new subtotal, "Sub total Staff and Grants", at EUR 2,713,107, or 87% of income. The 2023 report made a different claim: that "nearly 70% of the donation income went to developers in 2023 (was 60% in 2022)".

Both are true and they measure different things, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes the jump from 70% to 87% as a change in priorities. The 2023 statement counts developer salaries, remote developer staff and grants. The 2024 subtotal adds chairman salary, a new secretary salary, studio support and non-dev staff costs.

On the definition Blender used in 2023, the share going to developers in 2024 was 69.3%, essentially flat against 69.6%. In absolute terms it still rose from EUR 1,777,134 to EUR 2,153,490, up 21.2%, which tracks income almost exactly. The 87% is a real number about a broader category, not an increase in developer share.

What the numbers actually say

Strip out the corrections and the picture is straightforward, and better than the "operating at a loss" headline suggests.

Blender Foundation's income has grown every year for five years, from EUR 1,376,076 to EUR 3,106,361, and the composition has shifted decisively away from a handful of large corporate cheques toward a very large number of small ones. In 2020 the Epic Mega Grant alone was 24% of income. In 2024 no single line is more than 38%, and the fastest growing line by a distance is generic small donations. That is what the foundation says it has been trying to do since 2021, and it worked.

The 2024 deficit of EUR 73,853 is 2.4% of income, it was a deliberate board decision, and it exists partly because the campaign that would have covered it was deferred into 2025 on purpose. The genuine concern in that report is not the deficit, it is the reserve: five years of accumulation has produced EUR 567,046 against a stated target of roughly three months of cash flow, which on current spending is around EUR 795,000.

The 2024 report names four Development Fund members as assigning their own engineers to Blender itself: AMD, Apple, Intel and Nvidia. The 2022 report named a partly different set, adding Amazon, Facebook and Unity. That engineering never appears in the income statement at all, so a foundation with a EUR 3.1 million budget is running on more than it reports.

If you are quoting Blender's revenue, quote EUR 3,106,361 for 2024 and EUR 2,553,392 for 2023. If you are quoting the growth in individual donations, quote 38.9% rather than the 51.2% the newest report's arithmetic produces. And if you are building a series, use the 2022 report for 2021 rather than the 2021 report, because the foundation itself did.