Bytecode Alliance Foundation revenue: $288,126 in FY2024, and the half-million-dollar number Google still shows

Quick answer (October 2026). The Bytecode Alliance Foundation reported total revenue of $288,126 in FY2024, $560,835 in FY2023, $399,168 in FY2022 and $287,501 in FY2021. FY2024 is the most recent year on file: the return was filed on 22 October 2025 and no later return exists. Revenue fell 48.63% from the FY2023 peak. One hundred per cent of it, in every one of those four years, is membership dues. The Foundation has zero employees, pays its eight directors nothing, and spent $199,276 of its $255,800 FY2024 budget on a single expense line called Consultants.

That first paragraph is most of what people come looking for. The rest of this piece is the part that is not written down anywhere else.

The number on page one is a year out of date

Search for the Bytecode Alliance Foundation's revenue today and you get two different answers, roughly a factor of two apart, with nothing on the page explaining why.

The current figure is $288,126. The figure you will also see, repeatedly, is $560,835. That is FY2023, and it is the Foundation's all-time peak.

Grading the page-one results fairly, because they are not all the same:

Only one of those is genuinely misleading, and I want to be precise about it. 501c3Lookup serves the sentence "The organization reported annual revenue of $560,835.00, ranking 172,256 nationally (Top 7%) and 671 in DE (Top 6%)." That is Google's displayed snippet, quoted rather than linked because the page returns HTTP 403 to a non-browser client. The figure is real. It is just the wrong year, presented in the present tense with no year attached.

Wikipedia is silent rather than stale. There is no Bytecode Alliance article at all: the URL redirects to the WebAssembly page, which names the Alliance seven times in its visible text and carries no financial figure. An absence of a number is not a wrong number.

Four years, and the arc is the story

The Foundation was recognised as tax exempt in May 2023 and filed its first two returns that same year. Here is everything it has ever reported.

Revenue grew 95.07% between 2021 and 2023, then gave all of it back. FY2024 revenue of $288,126 lands $625 above FY2021 revenue of $287,501, a difference of 0.22%. Three years of growth, round-tripped.

Expenses did not round-trip. They went up every single year, 5.867 times over from $43,598 to $255,800, and they rose 8.82% in the year income halved. That is why the surplus fell 90.08%, from $325,774 to $32,326, and why the share of income consumed by running costs went from 41.91% to 88.78% in one step. If both lines simply continue, FY2025 is a deficit. That is arithmetic, not a forecast, and the Foundation has not published anything that would let anyone check it.

All of it is membership dues, and almost everyone calls it something else

ProPublica reports the Foundation's income as "Contributions", at 100.0% of revenue, and the other summaries that break revenue down at all follow the same label. Technically correct, and it gives entirely the wrong impression.

Form 990 Part VIII splits contributions across lines 1a to 1f, totalled at line 1h, with line 1g a memo line for the noncash portion. Line 1a is "Federated campaigns", line 1b is "Membership dues". In the filed XML for both FY2023 and FY2024, the element MembershipDuesAmt is exactly equal to TotalContributionsAmt: $560,834 and $288,125 respectively. Program service revenue is $0. The only other income in any year is $1 of investment income, reported as exactly one dollar four years running.

So this is not a donation-funded charity that happens to have members. It is a 501(c)(6) business league whose entire income is a corporate subscription, filed correctly on the correct line, and then flattened into the word "Contributions" by every downstream summary of it. The filer is right here. The legibility problem belongs to the readers.

The Foundation publishes its price list

The member logos on the Foundation's homepage include Fastly, Mozilla, Shopify, F5 and Microsoft, and the about page currently attributes five of its eight board seats to named member organisations, among them Bobby Holley to Mozilla, Tyler McMullen to Fastly, Oscar Spencer to F5 and Ralph Squillace to Microsoft. The membership agreement, whose PDF title records it as dated 15 June 2023, carries a full dues scale banded by consolidated employee headcount:

The same document says "The Board of Directors may waive Voting Membership fees for certain nonprofit or academic institutions that make a significant contribution to the work of the Bytecode Alliance", offers a non-voting tier with no fee, and states that "Membership fees shall not be refunded under any circumstances".

Put the scale against the money. The whole Foundation's FY2024 income of $288,125 is equivalent to 7.203 top-band memberships. A single member in the top band accounts for 13.88% of all revenue. The homepage currently displays 21 member logos, which would be a mean of $13,720 each if every one paid, and several of them are universities, research institutes and non-profits that the agreement allows the board to exempt. The roster is today's; the dues are FY2024's; members join and leave. The return discloses neither the member count nor any per-member figure, so the composition of the 48.63% fall is not established.

One suggestive thing, offered as a measurement and not a claim. Deferred revenue sat at exactly $40,000 at both the FY2022 and FY2023 year ends, and the top dues band is exactly $40,000. The agreement does provide for multi-year prepayment, with "fees for each year of its commitment shall be due upon joining". The return states no relationship between the two numbers, and neither will I.

Where the money goes

Part IX foots exactly in both years, which is worth saying as loudly as a discrepancy would be: the twelve non-zero lines in FY2023 sum to $235,061 and the ten in FY2024 sum to $255,800, each matching the reported total. The composition:

Consultants is 73.69% of FY2023 spending and 77.90% of FY2024 spending, and it grew 15.05% in the year income halved. It is the only line that matters.

This sits beside three facts that are each individually unremarkable and together are the most interesting thing in the filing. The Foundation reports zero employees. Every compensation line in Part IX is $0, and the block foots to Part I line 15 at $0, so there is no payroll line anywhere for a salary to sit in. And the Foundation's own about page lists David Bryant with the title Consulting Executive Director, describing the role as one that "supports the Board and oversees day-to-day operations as well as member relations."

I am not going to join those up further than the documents do. The return does not disclose who the consultants are or how the line divides. What it does disclose is that Part VII Section B, which Form 990 reserves for "your five highest compensated independent contractors that received more than $100,000 of compensation from the organization", is empty, and the count of such contractors is reported as zero. So the $199,276 reached at least two recipients, and no single one of them hit $100,000.

The eight directors are all reported at $0 across base, related and other compensation, in both years. That is not an omission: the bylaws, version 3.5 of May 2023, say "The Bytecode Alliance shall not pay Directors any stated salary or compensation for their services as Directors", followed by a proviso allowing the board to reimburse expenses.

The FY2023 "IRS penalty" of $3,899 is disclosed on Part IX and nowhere explained. The FY2021 return, for a period that ended on 31 December 2021, was filed on 26 May 2023. Both facts are on the record; the return does not connect them and neither does this piece.

The cash statement nobody publishes

Form 990 does not require a statement of cash flows, and the Foundation does not publish accounts. But Part X gives both year ends, so it can be derived. In FY2024, in the year revenue halved, cash went up $96,975.

Both columns foot to the dollar against the actual movement in cash and savings, $486,295 to $742,930 and then to $839,905. The FY2024 story is that a $32,326 surplus became $96,975 of cash because receivables were collected down from $120,173 to $36,666. The Foundation billed less and collected more. That is a one-off; the receivable can only be harvested once.

Deferred revenue is the other half. It was $40,000 at two consecutive year ends and the element is absent from the FY2024 closing balance sheet, not zero. Both returns are filed on the accrual basis, so a body that bills in advance normally carries some. It now carries none, which means no part of FY2025 was paid for in advance as at 31 December 2024.

The reserve, and what it is not

Net assets are $854,296 against FY2024 expenses of $255,800: 1,219 days of cover, or 3.34 years, down from 1,276 days. All of it is unrestricted. The return reports no donor-restricted net assets in either year, so this is genuinely spendable rather than committed.

Deferred revenue is already netted out of that figure, because net assets are assets less liabilities and deferred revenue is a liability. It is worth saying explicitly rather than subtracting it twice.

Three and a third years of cover is a comfortable position, and the honest summary of this Foundation's finances is that it is small, solvent and well capitalised. The pressure is on the income line, not the balance sheet.

"No documents available to the public"

Form 990 Part VI line 19 asks the filer to "Describe on Schedule O whether (and if so, how) the organization made its governing documents, conflict of interest policy, and financial statements available to the public during the tax year."

The Bytecode Alliance Foundation's Schedule O answers, in full, in both FY2023 and FY2024: "No documents available to the public."

Two things about that. First, it is partly contradicted by the Foundation's own website, which publicly links three governing documents: the bylaws, the IP policy and the membership agreement. All three resolve. I read all three for this piece.

Second, on the financial half it is exactly accurate, and the surrounding disclosures line up with it rather than against it:

• FSAuditedInd is false in both years. There are no audited financial statements.
• AccountantCompileOrReviewInd is also false. There is no compilation or review either. The entire accounting spend is $12,605.
• The Foundation reports no conflict of interest policy, no whistleblower policy and no document retention policy. Its 27 pages of bylaws contain zero occurrences of all three phrases, and zero occurrences of "audit", "financial statement" and "budget", so the return is consistent with its own constitution.
• Bylaws section 4.13 grants inspection rights to directors only: "Every Director shall have the absolute right at any time to inspect, copy and make extracts of, in person or by agent or attorney, all books, records and documents of every kind, and to inspect the physical properties of the Bytecode Alliance." Members get no such right.
• Bylaws section 9.3, headed Reports to Directors, Members, and Others, is one sentence long: "The Board shall cause such reports to be prepared, filed, and/or distributed as may be required."

A site-scoped search of bytecodealliance.org for financial, budget, dues or annual report returns two results in total: the bylaws PDF and the blog index. The Foundation does publish year-end reports, and they are good ones, but they are Cranelift and Wasmtime progress reports. Across the whole articles index there is not one dollar sign.

None of that is wrongdoing. A 501(c)(6) of this size is not required to be audited and is not required to publish anything. It is simply worth knowing that for this particular foundation the Form 990 is not one source among several. It is the only one.

What the return does not say

It does not say how many members paid, or at which band, or which ones left between 2023 and 2024. It does not identify the consultants. It does not explain the IRS penalty. It does not say whether the Consulting Executive Director is paid by the Foundation at all.

Those are the questions a reader actually has, and the honest answer is that the documents do not contain them. Everything above does.

Figures are from the Bytecode Alliance Foundation's filed Form 990 XML for tax years 2023 and 2024 (IRS object identifiers 202441139349300744 and 202502959349301415), from the four-year extract on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, and from the Foundation's own published bylaws and membership agreement. The IRS index for returns received in 2026 contains no row for this organisation, so the FY2024 return filed on 22 October 2025 is the most recent statement in existence. Comparative foundation figures are from the Software Stewardship Lab open source foundation financials report of 24 May 2026. Form line labels were checked against the IRS Form 990 itself.