Ruby Central revenue was $3,107,120 in 2024, and the reserve behind it was 45 days

Quick answer (September 2026). Ruby Central, Inc. reported total revenue of $3,107,120 in 2024, $2,128,731 in 2023 and $2,558,278 in 2022 on its Form 990. Expenses were $2,946,541, $2,206,265 and $2,848,995, so 2024 produced a surplus of $160,579 after two consecutive deficits. It was the best year in the organisation's history. Sixteen months after that year closed, on 16 April 2026, its own board wrote that Ruby Central had "found itself in real financial jeopardy". Both things are true, and the number that reconciles them is not revenue. It is the reserve. Ruby Central ended 2023 with net assets of $69,684 against $2,206,265 of annual expenses, which is 11.5 days of operating cost. The 2024 recovery took that to $361,498, or 44.8 days.

The 2024 return is the one that matters here, and it is the one almost nobody has read. It was filed on 17 November 2025 and it is the first Ruby Central return whose financial statements were independently audited.

The filings this is built from

Three Form 990s, taken from the IRS filed-XML archives rather than from any summary, covering the years ended 31 December 2022, 2023 and 2024. Ruby Central's EIN is 30-0040446. The 2024 return carries object id 202543219349316894 and arrived in the 2025 index; the 2022 and 2023 returns arrived in the 2024 index. The IRS publishes these as bulk XML, which is the only form in which the whole return is machine readable, schedules included.

Everything below is from those three returns, from Ruby Central's own 2022 to 2024 annual report, or from the board's April 2026 statement. Where those sources disagree, I say so and I do not pick a winner unless the arithmetic picks one.

Grading the answers that already exist

This is worth doing before criticising anything, because the incumbent answer here is mostly good.

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer page for Ruby Central is correct and current. It publishes revenue $3,107,120, expenses $2,946,541, total assets $1,274,447 and total liabilities $912,949 for 2024, and every one of those matches the filed XML exactly. If you only want the headline numbers, that page has them and it is right.

There is one caveat, and it is about the API rather than the page. ProPublica's machine-readable filings_with_data list stops at the 2023 return. The 2024 filing sits in filings_without_data with a null object id, while the same record's tax_period field reads 2024-12-01 and latest_object_id names the filing. So a human reading the website sees 2024; a tool iterating the filings list does not. That is the same blind spot I hit on NumFOCUS, and it is worth knowing if you build anything on top of that endpoint.

Wikipedia's Ruby Central article contains no revenue figure at all, so it is not wrong, it is silent.

What none of them publish is the reserve, the composition of the liabilities, or the reconciliation between a record year and a solvency warning. That is the gap this piece fills.

The number that is not revenue

Revenue is the wrong metric for an organisation that runs infrastructure. What matters is how long it can keep running if the money is late. Net assets divided by annual expenses answers that.

The 2021 column comes from the prior-year column of the 2022 return. Read left to right, this is the whole story. In 2021 Ruby Central held about four and a half months of cost. By the end of 2023 it held eleven and a half days, and during that year it was operating RubyGems.org, the package registry the entire Ruby ecosystem installs from.

The board's own diagnosis in April 2026 was that the organisation's finances had "become overly dependent on the optimistic timing of when funds may be received against fixed timelines for when our expenses are due". That is a precise description of what a two-week reserve does to you. It is not a revenue problem. An organisation with 11.5 days of cover has no capacity to absorb a sponsor paying sixty days late, however large the sponsor is.

What the 2024 cash is actually for

The 2024 balance sheet looks, at a glance, like a rescue. Cash went from $156,200 to $1,271,264 in twelve months. That is the figure that makes the later warning confusing.

It is not spare money. Total liabilities at the same date were $912,949, and the return breaks them into three lines:

The three lines sum to $912,949 exactly. Cash less total liabilities is $358,315, which is within $3,183 of the reported net assets of $361,498, the difference being prepaid expenses. So the $1.27 million is roughly 72 per cent committed, and the uncommitted remainder is the 44.8 days in the table above.

The grants payable line deserves attention because it is new, it is large, and it does not have an obvious partner. It is $630,000, it did not exist at the end of 2023, and it is 69.0 per cent of all liabilities and 49.6 per cent of the cash. Meanwhile Part IX of the same return reports zero grants to domestic organisations, zero to domestic individuals and zero foreign grants, and Part I line 13 reports zero grants paid.

I am not going to tell you what that means, because the return does not say and Schedule O is silent on it. Two readings are available. Either Ruby Central committed $630,000 of grants during 2024 and the expense sits inside another line, most plausibly the $1,308,367 of "other expenses" that is charged entirely to program services, or the liability arises from something that is not a grant expense recognised in 2024 at all. The filing supports both and settles neither. What is checkable, and what I will assert, is that a $630,000 liability appeared in a year whose return reports no grant expense.

How Ruby Central stopped being a conference company

The reserve collapse has a cause, and it is visible in the revenue mix.

In 2021 Ruby Central was a conference organisation: 94.9 per cent of its money was earned from running RubyConf and RailsConf. By 2024, 76.1 per cent of it was donated and only 23.9 per cent was earned. Program service revenue has fallen every single year, and 2024's $742,230 is 49.3 per cent below the 2021 figure. Contributions over the same period went up roughly thirtyfold.

The inflection is 2022, and Ruby Central's own history page explains it: that is the year Ruby Together merged into Ruby Central, "uniting the operations, maintenance, and hosting of the RubyGems service under one entity". Ruby Together was the sponsorship-funded body that paid for RubyGems and Bundler maintenance. The merger brought both the infrastructure obligation and the sponsorship dependency onto one balance sheet, and the conference business that had historically funded the organisation kept shrinking underneath it.

That is a structurally different organisation from the one that existed in 2021, and it is one whose income arrives on the schedule its sponsors choose.

Where the money comes from now, in the organisation's own numbers

Schedule A is where a 501(c)(3) has to show the shape of its support, and Ruby Central's changed sharply in 2024.

Its public support percentage under the 509(a)(2) test was 99.71 per cent for 2022, 99.69 per cent for 2023 and 82.72 per cent for 2024. A drop of almost seventeen percentage points in a year is unusual. The threshold is 33.33 per cent, so Ruby Central passes the test comfortably and nothing about its status is at risk. It is the direction that is informative, not the level.

The cause is printed on the same schedule. The 2024 return reports amounts received from disqualified persons of $426,632 for 2022, $722,110 for 2023 and $360,000 for 2024, totalling $1,508,742. A disqualified person in this context includes a substantial contributor, an officer or director, or an entity controlled by one. Those amounts are subtracted from public support, which is exactly why the percentage moved. Ruby Central's own annual report names Shopify, Fastly, Sidekiq and Ruby Together as the partnerships that funded RubyGems work over this period, and names Cisco, Chime, Revela and Gusto among conference sponsors.

Payroll tells the same concentration story from the cost side. Salaries, compensation and benefits went from $247,752 in 2023 to $614,279 in 2024, a factor of 2.48, while the number of employees reported on the organisation's W-3 stayed at three in all three years. The 2024 figure decomposes as officer compensation $166,672, other salaries and wages $389,605 and payroll taxes $58,002, which sum to $614,279 exactly. Alongside that, $857,911 went to contractors under fees for services.

Two officers were paid. The return names Adarsh Pandit, Executive Director, at $95,000, and Diesha Cooper, Chief Financial Officer, at $71,672. Those sum to the $166,672 officer line exactly, and to the $166,672 reported in Part VII. In April 2026 the board wrote that it had "parted ways with our Executive Director, our PR agency, our CFO, and concluded several contractor engagements". The 2024 return was signed by Diesha Cooper on 17 November 2025.

The first audit, and what it moved

The 2024 return answers yes to the question of whether the organisation's financial statements were audited by an independent accountant. The 2022 and 2023 returns both answer no. So 2024 is the first audited year in this series, and that turns out to matter.

The audit moved the opening balance. The 2024 return reports a prior period adjustment of $131,235, and it is needed to make the year foot at all:

All three years reconcile exactly. That is worth stating plainly, because a roll-forward that does not foot is usually the first sign of trouble and here there is none.

But look at the size of the 2024 adjustment against what it is adjusting. The 2023 return reported closing net assets of $69,684. The first audit restated that opening position upward by $131,235, to $200,919. The correction is 188.3 per cent of the balance it corrected. An organisation whose entire net worth was under $70,000 on its own unaudited numbers turned out, on audit, to have been understating it by nearly twice that amount.

One honest note on the other direction: the 2024 return also carries no audit committee. The question "did the organisation have an audit committee" is answered no.

Schedule D, which exists to reconcile a return against audited statements, reports no reconciling items at all: total revenue per the audited financial statements of $3,107,120 against $3,107,120 per the return, and total expenses of $2,946,541 against $2,946,541. The audited statements and the tax return agree to the dollar. That is a clean result and I am reporting it as one.

Ruby Central's own annual report, checked line by line

Ruby Central's governance and finances section links exactly one financial document, a 2022 to 2024 annual report, served from a path dated January 2026 though the document itself carries no publication date. It links no Form 990s. Page 40 of that report carries a table headed "990 HIGHLIGHTS" with five lines across three years, fifteen cells.

Thirteen of the fifteen cells match the filed returns exactly. That is the headline and it should be, because it is a better hit rate than most self-published summaries manage.

Two cells do not.

The first is 2023 revenue, which the report gives as $2,218,731. The filed 2023 return says $2,128,731. The digits "12" have become "21", overstating the year by $90,000.

The second is 2024 total assets, which the report gives as $1,274,477 against the filed $1,274,447, an overstatement of $30. That one is self-detecting, because it breaks the report's own arithmetic. Assets of $1,274,477 less liabilities of $912,949 is $361,528, but the same row states net assets of $361,498. The row misses by exactly the $30. The filed return, with $1,274,447, foots precisely.

There is a third disagreement, and it is inside the report rather than against the IRS. Page 37 states that "Ruby Central's total revenue grew from $2.56 million in 2022 to $3.7 million in 2024, a 20% increase". Page 40 of the same document gives 2024 revenue as $3,107,120. The two pages do not agree. The arithmetic says page 40 is the right one: $2,558,278 to $3,107,120 is a 21.5 per cent increase, which rounds to the stated 20 per cent, whereas $2,558,278 to $3.7 million would be a 44.6 per cent increase. The percentage in that sentence is consistent with the filed figure; the endpoint beside it is not.

I should also record what the report is not. Across 47 pages it contains no auditor's name, no independent accountant's opinion, no statement of activities and no statement of financial position. Its only use of the word "audited" describes engineers auditing infrastructure components. For 2024 the organisation does have audited statements, as its own tax return confirms, but they are not published here. The financial disclosure is the fifteen-cell table, and it points readers to ProPublica for the rest.

The six-month reserve claim

Page 38 of that report says: "In 2022, Ruby Central began a disciplined effort to build a reliable operating reserve. As of mid-2024, we maintain a cash reserve equal to six months of operating expenses."

This one deserves care, because the claim is about a mid-year date and the filings only observe year ends. Here is what can actually be checked.

Mid-2024 is bracketed by the 2023 and 2024 rows. On the gross cash reading the organisation went from 0.85 months to 5.18 months across that year, so six months is never reached at either end, though it is not far from the December figure. Six months of 2024 expenses would be $1,473,270, which is more than the $1,271,264 actually held in December. For the claim to hold at mid-year, cash would have had to rise above $1.47 million by June from $156,200 in January and then fall back by more than $200,000 by December. Conference receipts are seasonal and RailsConf ran in the spring, so that is not impossible. It is simply not observable in anything Ruby Central has published, and the December balance sheet does not support it.

On the net reading, cash less what is owed, the claim does not hold at either bracketing date: $65,013 at the end of 2023 and $358,315 at the end of 2024, against a six-month requirement above $1.1 million on any of these years' cost bases.

The distinction between those two readings is not academic, and it is the distinction the board itself drew eighteen months later when it described funds arriving on optimistic timing against fixed expense deadlines. A reserve you have already promised to someone else is not a reserve.

The audit: 56 checks, 54 exact

Every figure above was checked against the filed XML by script, and the arithmetic was checked against itself. Fifty-six checks, fifty-four exact.

Fifteen of them compare Ruby Central's annual report table against the three returns: thirteen agree exactly and two do not, and those two are the finding described above rather than a failure of this audit. Twenty-four recompute a derived value, which is every ratio, percentage, multiple and days-of-reserve figure in this piece, from its published inputs. Seventeen test an identity that has to hold: the three liability lines summing to the total, the 2024 payroll decomposition, officer compensation against both Part VII and Part IX, the three-way functional expense split, all three net-asset roll-forwards, the balance-sheet identity on both the filed returns and the annual report, and the Schedule A disqualified-person total. All forty-one of those pass.

Two restatements turned up on the way. The 2022 return reported total expenses of $2,848,995; the 2023 return's prior-year column reports $2,834,985 for the same year, $14,010 lower. That is internally consistent: $30,000 moved into salaries and $44,010 out of other expenses, a net of $14,010. The second is inside the 2024 return itself, which reports 2023 contributions as $1,338,097 in its Part I prior-year column and $1,463,170 in its Schedule A five-year table, a difference of $125,073. Schedule A line 1 includes membership fees, which Part VIII may classify elsewhere, so there is a legitimate reading in which both are right. The return does not explain it and I am not deriving a third number from it.

What this means if you depend on RubyGems

Ruby Central reported three employees on its W-3 in each of these years, and it operates the package registry for one of the most widely deployed languages on the internet, and for the three years covered here it did so on between eleven and forty-five days of unencumbered reserve.

Its revenue was never the problem. 2024 was a record, the surplus was real, the audit found no reconciling items, and its own summary of its finances is 87 per cent exact. What the filings show is an organisation whose earned income halved, whose donated income became three quarters of the total, and which therefore inherited its funders' payment calendars without ever building the buffer that makes those calendars survivable.

If you fund open source infrastructure, the number to ask for is not annual revenue. It is months of unrestricted reserve, net of what is already committed. On that measure Ruby Central's best year still ended at just over six weeks.

One figure that is not in any filing yet: 2025. The IRS index for 2026 contains no Ruby Central return, so the year that ended in the middle of the RubyGems governance dispute, and the year immediately before the board's warning, has not been filed. When it is, the reserve line is the one to read first.