Ecosia Publishes Its Revenue Every Month. Nobody Has Ever Added It Up.
Ecosia's total income ran EUR 1.39M (2015) to EUR 43.24M (2025), with EUR 22.48M in H1 2026. Summing eleven years of its own monthly reports reveals a three-year plateau and the only decline in company history, plus an aggregator estimate off by more than half.
In this story
Quick answer (2026): 
The number on page one is less than half the real one
Search ecosia revenue and the first independent-looking data source you hit is Growjo, which puts Ecosia's annual revenue at "currently $19.9M per year" and its headcount at 137.
Ecosia's own published figure for 2025 is EUR 43,235,346. At the exchange rates Ecosia itself applied that month, that is roughly USD 49.0M. The aggregator is not slightly off. It is out by a factor of about two and a half.
Statista has the real monthly series, but paywalls the values, so the public snippet renders the actual numbers as asterisks. Wikipedia carries a single correct figure, "43.2M EUR (2025)", cited to Ecosia's own reports, and no history.
So the position on August 23, 2026 is that the most transparent search company in Europe publishes its revenue every month, and the open web still cannot tell you what that revenue has been.
The full ledger: Ecosia revenue by year, 2015 to 2026
Ecosia's financial reports page carries a month selector going back to January 2015 and a currency toggle. Every month reports a total income figure. Summed by calendar year, in euros:
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| Year | Total income (EUR) | Change | Source type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 1,390,056 | first full year | Published monthly |
| 2016 | 2,063,130 | +48.4% | Published monthly |
| 2017 | 8,066,642 | +291.0% | Published monthly |
| 2018 | 9,047,145 | +12.2% | Published monthly |
| 2019 | 19,309,679 | +113.4% | Published monthly |
| 2020 | 21,909,768 | +13.5% | Published monthly |
| 2021 | 28,068,313 | +28.1% | Published monthly |
| 2022 | 34,503,088 | +22.9% | Published monthly |
| 2023 | 35,361,714 | +2.5% | Published monthly |
| 2024 | 34,444,877 | -2.6% | Published monthly |
| 2025 | 43,235,346 | +25.5% | Published monthly |
| 2026 (Jan to Jun) | 22,478,010 | +10.1% vs H1 2025 | Published monthly |
Cumulative total income from January 2015 to June 2026: EUR 259,877,768.
Two independent checks say this addition is right. Wikipedia's cited 2025 figure of 43.2M EUR matches the twelve 2025 months summed to EUR 43,235,346. And a widely shared Reddit thread quoting "EUR 3.9 million (vs EUR 2.5 million last year)" for a single August matches the underlying months exactly: August 2025 was EUR 3,893,732 and August 2024 was EUR 2,530,505, both rounded.
One caution on the currency toggle. The reports page renders the same figures in EUR, USD or GBP depending on what you select, using Ecosia's own conversion for that month. Every number in this article is the EUR figure. A dollar figure taken off that page is a conversion, not a separate measurement.
The three years nobody noticed
The headline anyone would write from the endpoints is "Ecosia grew from EUR 1.4M to EUR 43.2M in a decade". True, and it hides the interesting part.
From 2022 to 2024 Ecosia's revenue did essentially nothing:
- 2022: EUR 34,503,088
- 2023: EUR 35,361,714, up EUR 858,626
- 2024: EUR 34,444,877, down EUR 916,837
Three years, and 2024 finished below 2022. That -2.6% in 2024 is the only negative year in the eleven-year series. The monthly detail is worse than the annual total suggests: September 2024 came in at EUR 2,294,182, the weakest month since early 2021.
For a company whose entire public story is growth in service of tree planting, that is a genuinely difficult stretch, and it is invisible in every summary of Ecosia that exists.
What Ecosia was doing while revenue went sideways
The monthly reports carry an optional context note. In March, April and June 2024, three of the worst months in the run, Ecosia attached the same one:
This month, we spent more on marketing than usual to prepare for the upcoming Choice Screen in the EU. In the long-run, this should lead to a larger Ecosia community, and more trees.
The choice screen was the browser and device selection prompt mandated by the EU's Digital Markets Act, which classifies 
So the sequence is: revenue flat, then declining, and the company increased discretionary marketing spend into the decline, on a regulatory bet with a payback measured in years.
Then 2025 grew 25.5% to EUR 43.24M, and H1 2026 is running 10.1% ahead of H1 2025. The bet is not fully proven by that alone, and Ecosia has never published a clean attribution of choice-screen acquisition. But the shape is at least consistent with the thing they said they were buying.
Why it could afford a bad year
Most companies cannot spend into a revenue decline. Ecosia's ownership structure is the reason it can.
In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll transferred shares to the Purpose Foundation. Kroll and co-owner Tim Schumacher gave up the right to sell Ecosia or to take any profits out of it. The company states the consequence plainly on its own reports page:
Ecosia is a not-for-profit business. We don't pay out dividends and cannot be bought. That way, we're able to use 100% of our profits for the planet.
This is steward ownership, and it is a different animal from the merely bootstrapped companies that usually get written about. A bootstrapped founder still owns an asset they could sell. Ecosia's founders contractually cannot.
The practical effect on a bad year is specific. There is no investor asking why 2024 finished below 2022, no board pushing a cut to marketing to protect the number, and no acquirer to impress. There is also no exit. The structure that made a three-year plateau survivable is the same structure that means nobody involved ever gets paid out for surviving it.
That trade is worth sitting with, because the second half is the part founders skip when they romanticise it.
Where the money actually went in June 2026
The reports break down every euro. June 2026, total income EUR 3,547,204:
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| Line | EUR | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Trees (paid to planting partners) | 1,165,722 | 32.9% |
| Other climate impact and reserves | 680,225 | 19.2% |
| Operational costs | 789,914 | 22.3% |
| Taxes | 650,173 | 18.3% |
| Building search diversity | 162,000 | 4.6% |
| Marketing | 99,170 | 2.8% |
Inside operational costs, personnel is EUR 534,296 and servers and software EUR 148,882. Ecosia runs a search engine on a software bill under EUR 150,000 a month, because it is not paying to crawl and index most of the web itself.
The tax line is worth noting for a company with no shareholders to enrich: EUR 350,000 corporate tax, EUR 173,177 social security, EUR 126,996 employment taxes, filed under a heading Ecosia titles "Proudly paying taxes".
The dependency the ledger does not show
A revenue table makes a business look more self-determined than it is. Ecosia's does not show that its income is, structurally, a share of somebody else's ad auction.
That is the real risk in the ledger. A partner renegotiation moves this table more than any product decision Ecosia can make, which is the same exposure Plausible describes in competing against Google from the analytics side.
Which is presumably why the EUR 162,000 a month line called "building search diversity" exists. Ecosia is a founding partner of European Search Perspective, a joint venture with Qwant building an independent European index called Staan, which TechCrunch reported on August 6, 2025 and which began partially serving Ecosia queries that month. At current run rate that is close to EUR 2M a year, spent on reducing the dependency rather than on growth.
What an operator can actually take from this
Three things, and only the first is comfortable.
Publishing your numbers monthly does not mean anyone reads them. Ecosia has published for eleven consecutive years, and the top independent result for its revenue is still an estimate that is out by more than half. Transparency is not distribution. If the number matters to you commercially, someone has to actually assemble it into a claim, which is exactly what Ghost does by publishing its finances in public and what almost nobody else in this position does.
A three-year plateau is survivable, and it is mostly a governance question. Nothing about Ecosia's 2022 to 2024 stretch was solved by a growth tactic. It was solved by having a cap table that let them keep spending. Most founders reading this have investors, or want them, and should be honest that the same plateau would be handled very differently with a board.
Watch what a company spends on reducing its own dependency. Ecosia's most revealing line is not revenue. It is EUR 162,000 a month, about 4.6% of income, going into an index that competes with the supplier its income comes from. That is a company pricing its single largest structural risk and paying down the principal. Most operators never put a number on theirs.
Frequently asked questions
Written by
Joaquin del RioJoaquin del Rio covers the money behind the milestones for OperatorBook, digging into what bootstrapped and indie founders actually earn and what it took to get there.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ecosia's annual revenue?
Ecosia's total income was EUR 43,235,346 in 2025, its highest year on record, and EUR 22,478,010 in the first half of 2026. The figures come from Ecosia's own monthly financial reports rather than from estimates. Data aggregators quoting around USD 19.9M are understating the real number by more than half.
How much has Ecosia made in total?
Adding every monthly report Ecosia has published from January 2015 through June 2026 gives a cumulative total income of EUR 259,877,768. Ecosia has published a financial report every month for eleven consecutive years, so the full series is available from primary sources.
Has Ecosia's revenue ever declined?
Yes, once. Revenue fell 2.6% in 2024, from EUR 35,361,714 (2023) to EUR 34,444,877 (2024), the only annual decline in the eleven-year series. It followed an almost flat 2023 (+2.5%), making 2022 to 2024 a three-year plateau. Revenue then grew 25.5% in 2025.
How does Ecosia make money?
Ecosia earns a share of search advertising revenue. Ads on Ecosia are delivered by Microsoft Advertising and Yahoo under a revenue-sharing arrangement, and Ecosia's results have historically been sourced from Google and Bing alongside its own Staan index. Ecosia held roughly 0.10% to 0.15% of the global search market in 2025.
Who owns Ecosia and can it be sold?
Ecosia GmbH is majority controlled by the Purpose Foundation. In October 2018 founder Christian Kroll transferred shares to the foundation, and Kroll and co-owner Tim Schumacher gave up the right to sell Ecosia or take profits out of it. Ecosia states it pays no dividends and cannot be bought, a structure known as steward ownership.
How much of Ecosia's income actually goes to trees?
In June 2026, on total income of EUR 3,547,204, Ecosia paid EUR 1,165,722 directly to tree-planting partners (32.9%) and a further EUR 680,225 to other climate impact and reserves (19.2%). The remainder went to operational costs (EUR 789,914), taxes (EUR 650,173), building search diversity (EUR 162,000) and marketing (EUR 99,170).
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