Calyx Institute revenue was $7,198,949 in 2025, and $2,516,681 of it goes straight back to members

Quick answer. Calyx Institute revenue was $7,198,949 in the fiscal year ended 30 April 2025, against expenses of $6,611,380, a surplus of $587,569 and net assets of $9,031,203. The two prior years were $6,682,695 (FY2024) and $7,813,358 (FY2023). But $2,482,692 of the 2025 figure is membership dues, and the same return books $2,516,681 under "Benefits paid to or for members", so roughly a third of the headline arrives and leaves in the same year. Strip the membership programme out and the operating surplus falls from $2,912,244 to $621,558 in two years, a drop of 78.66%.

Every figure below comes from the organisation's own Forms 990 as filed with the IRS, read from the e-file XML rather than from a summary. Three returns were used: the year ended 30 April 2023, the year ended 30 April 2024, and the year ended 30 April 2025, the last of which was filed on 16 March 2026.

Four answers sit on page one, and they disagree by 15 times

Search for this number and you are handed four figures that cannot all be describing the same organisation.

So the spread between the lowest published answer and the top of the highest is about fifteen to one. Nobody reconciles them, and two of the four are wrong in opposite directions at once.

The two that are right deserve to be called right. ProPublica's page carries the 2025 revenue, expenses, net assets, the full officer table and even a one-line note that the organisation reported an excess benefit transaction. philanthropy.org's canonical page states "For fiscal year 2025 it reported $7.2M in revenue, $6.6M in expenses, and $9.0M in net assets" and lists six filings on file. The fair verdict on both is accurate and radically incomplete, not wrong: neither breaks out membership dues, neither breaks out benefits paid to members, and neither mentions what is new in the 2025 schedules.

One footnote on ProPublica worth knowing if you use it programmatically. Its web page is current. Its API is not: the filings_with_data array stops at the year ended April 2023, two years behind the page, while the same API record's tax_period field already reads 2025-04-01. If you query the API and trust the array, you will publish a two-year-old number.

Why the years look inconsistent: the same twelve months has three names

Calyx's fiscal year ends on 30 April. That single fact explains most of the apparent contradiction, and almost nobody states it.

The IRS labels the year ended 30 April 2025 as tax year 2024, because that is the calendar year the period began in. The return's own header confirms it: TaxPeriodEndDt 2025-04-30, TaxYr 2024. ProPublica labels the same twelve months 2025, after the period end. Wikipedia's infobox uses the IRS style.

That is why the same $1,615,118 appears on Wikipedia labelled 2019 and in ProPublica's data labelled 2020. These are not two different measurements. They are the same fiscal year under two naming conventions. Wikipedia is not using a wrong number for 2019; it is using a correct number for a year that ended five filings ago, and calling it by the IRS name.

Wikipedia is, incidentally, current on leadership. Its infobox already names Ellen McDermott as interim Executive Director, which matches the 2025 return. It is the money that is stale, not the page.

The line nobody quotes

Part IX line 4 of the Form 990 is "Benefits paid to or for members". On the FY2025 return it reads $2,516,681. That is 38.07% of all expenses and the single largest line on the statement, larger than officer compensation and all other salaries and wages combined.

It exists because of how Calyx is funded. The organisation's own support page describes the model plainly: as a Calyx internet member "you can get unlimited mobile data in the U.S. on a Calyx hotspot or a device of your choice", and as a CalyxOS phone member "you can get a Pixel 8a phone with CalyxOS pre-installed".

CalyxOS is an Android distribution, and the membership that funds it ships physical hardware and data to the member. Those dues arrive on Part VIII line 1b as contributions, not as program service revenue. Program service revenue on the FY2025 return is exactly $0.

So the headline revenue figure and the headline expense figure both carry the same roughly $2.5M of member money passing through.

The membership programme has lost money three years running

Putting the two lines side by side is the whole finding.

In all three years the benefits cost slightly more than the dues brought in. This is not presented as a failure: a charity that delivers connectivity to members at a small loss is doing exactly what it says it does. It does mean the membership line is not a margin business subsidising the mission, and it means the difference between reported surplus and operating surplus is precisely the membership shortfall, to the dollar, in each of the three years.

What is actually left for the mission

Remove dues from revenue and benefits from expenses, and a different organisation appears.

Ex-membership revenue is roughly flat across the three years. Ex-membership expenses rose 89.31%, from $2,162,943 to $4,094,699. The surplus that funds everything else fell 78.66%.

The reported numbers tell the same story more quietly: revenue is down 7.86% over two years while total expenses are up 34.44%, and the reported surplus went from $2,895,677 to $587,569, a fall of 79.71%.

Where the money went

Total salaries, compensation and employee benefits, Part I line 15, rose 137.44% from $1,072,409 to $2,546,374. Reported employees went from 11 to 16 and individuals paid over $100,000 from four to seven.

Two details in that table are worth naming rather than glossing. Grantmaking stopped. Calyx gave $188,990 to other organisations in FY2023 and $95,000 in FY2024, to recipients including Demand Progress Education Fund (EIN 87-1987049, verified against the recipient's own IRS record), Blacks In Cybersecurity Headquarters Incorporated, Distributed Denial of Secrets and Sunset Spark. The FY2025 return carries no Schedule I at all and reports zero grants on every line. And accounting fees went to zero in the same year legal fees rose 161.61%.

One further change is visible in Part VII and is reported here as a measurement rather than a conclusion: the average weekly hours reported for every listed employee is 40 on the FY2023 and FY2024 returns and as 32 on the FY2025 return. The return does not explain the change.

The FY2025 officer table also shows an interim leader out-earning the founder.

The board is listed as Ashi Krishnan, Liz O'Sullivan, Carey Shenkman and Kobi Snitz, each at one hour per week and zero compensation. Two of those four names do not appear on the FY2023 or FY2024 returns.

Two things appear for the first time in the 2025 filing

Diffing the schedule list across the three returns is a cheap check and it pays here. FY2023 and FY2024 each filed Schedules A, B, D, F, I, J, M and O. FY2025 drops Schedule I and adds Schedule L and Schedule R.

Schedule R. Calyx reports two disregarded entities, both new: Calyx Holdings LLC and Calyx Networks LLC, both domiciled in Washington State at an address in Spokane, both with the stated primary activity "Housing IT infrastructure", and both reporting total income of $0 and end-of-year assets of $0. On the same return, net land, buildings and equipment rose 4.25x, from $109,968 to $466,979, and depreciation more than tripled. A Brooklyn nonprofit appears to be standing up physical infrastructure in Spokane, and the entities are so far empty shells.

Schedule L. This is the more serious disclosure and it deserves to be reported exactly as filed, without extrapolation. Part IV line 25a of the Form 990 asks whether the organisation engaged in an excess benefit transaction with a disqualified person during the year. Line 25b asks whether it is aware of such a transaction in a prior year that was not reported on an earlier return. On the FY2023 and FY2024 returns both answers are No. On the FY2025 return both answers are Yes.

Schedule L Part I then names one transaction. The person is Nicholas Merrill, Calyx's founder, whose relationship to the organisation is given as "Officer". The description of the transaction is four words: "Use of Intellectual Property". The box for whether the transaction was corrected is not ticked. Tax imposed is reported as $0 and tax reimbursed as $0.

What the return does not say is as important. It states no amount for the transaction, Schedule L Part I does not require one, and there is no Schedule O explanation anywhere in the filing: the supplemental schedule covers only Part VI lines 11b, 12c, 15 and 19 and Part XI line 9. So a reader can establish that a transaction was disclosed, who it involved and what it concerned, and cannot establish its size, its date, or the organisation's account of it. No section 4958 excise tax is reported as having been imposed. Nothing here establishes wrongdoing, and it would be wrong to read it that way; what it establishes is that the organisation itself made a disclosure it had not made in either prior year, and did not annotate it.

Every noncash gift is cryptocurrency

Schedule M breaks out noncash contributions, and Calyx has exactly one category in all three years.

That is 922 individual crypto gifts across three years and no other noncash category whatsoever. The organisation's own Schedule O note explains the mechanism: "The Calyx Institute has accounts with cryptocurrency exchanges to receive and sell cryptocurrency." The valuation method is given as fair market value at time of receipt, no Forms 8283 were received in any year, and the return reports no review process for unusual noncash gifts. At $167,039 this is 2.42% of FY2025 contributions, so it is a texture finding rather than a material one, but it is a striking piece of texture for a privacy organisation.

For an organisation that runs its community on Matrix and ships an Android distribution, the funding mix is unusually coherent with the audience.

What these filings will not tell you

Three things are genuinely unavailable, and saying so is part of the answer.

There is no restricted versus unrestricted split. Part X lines 27 and 28, net assets without and with donor restrictions, are absent from all three returns, not zero. Instead each return completes lines 29 through 33, which the form reserves for "Organizations that do not follow FASB ASC 958". The entire $9,031,203 sits on line 31, "Retained earnings, endowment, accumulated income, or other funds", with capital stock at line 29 and paid-in surplus at line 30 both zero. So how much of the reserve is committed cannot be determined from these documents.

There are no audited financial statements. FSAuditedInd is 0 on all three returns. Calyx publishes no financial statements, no annual report and no 990 link on its own site. That also removes the usual cross-check: Schedule D Parts XI and XII, which reconcile a return against audited statements, are unavailable here.

Schedule B is withheld. The donor schedule is filed but its contributor detail is redacted in the public copy, which is normal and lawful. Given that $4,416,608 of FY2025 contributions sit on line 1f, all other contributions not itemised above, with government grants at zero, the concentration of that money is exactly what a reader would want and exactly what is not public.

One consequence is worth spelling out fairly. Schedule A reports total support of $30,557,053 and public support of $30,557,053, giving a computed public support percentage of 100.00%. That is because the investment income shown in Part VIII does not appear on the Schedule A line reserved for it. Adding back every dollar of investment income identifiable across the window, $467,876, would take the percentage to 98.49%, still about 2.95 times the 33.33% threshold. The public charity status was never close to being at risk, and the presentation quirk does not change that.

Against that, the reserve itself is healthy. Net assets rose 25.83% over two years, from $7,177,354 to $9,031,203, and total liabilities are only $295,017, all of it accounts payable and accrued expenses, with no deferred revenue and no debt. On expenses of $6,611,380 that is 499 days of cover, down from 533 days in FY2023 and 560 in FY2024 because spending grew, not because reserves fell.

Did the numbers add up

Yes, and unusually well. Every footing that can be tested inside these three returns was tested: 44 checks, 44 passed, 0 failed.

That covers, for each of the three years, the Part I revenue components against total revenue, the Part XI roll-forward from opening to closing net assets, assets minus liabilities against net assets, the Part X asset components against total assets, the Part IX expense lines against total functional expenses, the Part IX functional columns, the Part I line 15 salary aggregate, the Part VIII contributions block, the Schedule F regional table, the Schedule A five-year row, public support against total support, and both Part VII compensation totals.

The Schedule A five-year table was audited separately from Part I, because the two can restate independently. It does not restate: 13 cells covering 5 fiscal years appear in more than one return, giving 8 cross-return comparisons, and every one agrees to the dollar.

Two honest qualifications. The FY2025 Part XI carries an other-changes line of -$3, which Schedule O explains as "This is a fractions-of-cents adjustment"; the FY2023 equivalent is +$3. And the Schedule A line 1 figures do not equal the corresponding Part I contributions in any overlapping year. For FY2024 and FY2025 they equal total revenue instead, investment income included, which is why the Schedule A investment-income line reads nil. For the year ended April 2023 the Schedule A figure of $6,704,985 matches neither total revenue ($7,813,358) nor total contributions ($7,672,279), a gap of $1,108,373 that these documents do not explain. It is named here and deliberately not attributed, because guessing at it would be inventing a number.

How to check this yourself

None of this requires paid data. The IRS publishes every electronically filed Form 990 as raw XML.

1. Find the EIN. Calyx Institute is 27-2800937.
2. Fetch the year index from the IRS Form 990 series downloads and find the row for that EIN. The index year is the year the return was received, not the tax year, so search more than one.
3. The row gives an object ID and the archive that holds it. Calyx's three most recent returns are object IDs 202410759349300506, 202540739349301659 and 202610759349300776.
4. Read the XML. Part VIII line 1b is membership dues, Part IX line 4 is benefits paid to members, and the difference between them is the number this article is about.

For the summarised version, ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer page is accurate and current, and philanthropy.org's organisation page agrees with it. For the organisation's own description of the membership model, see Calyx's support page. The Wikipedia article is the one to treat with care on money.

If you want the same treatment applied to a neighbouring privacy organisation, our reading of the Tor Project's filings found revenue of $12,279,993 in 2025 and a US government share that fell to 22.6%.