Software Freedom Conservancy revenue was USD 3,214,723, and no public source has it

Quick answer (September 2026). Software Freedom Conservancy's revenue was $4,187,196 in the year ended February 28, 2023, $2,487,144 in the year ended February 29, 2024, and $3,214,723 in the year ended February 28, 2025. The last two of those three figures appear nowhere in public. Both returns are filed with the IRS, and neither has been published by Conservancy or extracted by any nonprofit data aggregator. Over the two years, revenue fell 23.22%, the organisation ran deficits of $1,991,310 and then $590,627, and its unrestricted reserves halved from $2,298,111 to $1,006,678.

Every figure in this piece comes from Conservancy's own filed Form 990 XML, downloaded from the IRS bulk archive, cross-checked against Conservancy's own published audited accounts.

Why nobody has these numbers

Conservancy publishes its filings, and does so more thoroughly than most charities. Its transparency page carries fifty PDFs going back to 2006: Form 990s, independent auditor's reports, New York State CHAR500s, the original Form 1023, the certificate of incorporation and the by-laws.

The newest Form 990 on that page is for the fiscal year ended February 28, 2023.

The page does not stop there, though. Under a heading for the fiscal year running from 2023-03-01 through 2024-02-29, in place of the usual set of document links, there is a single sentence. It reads, verbatim: "FY2023-24 was filed on 2025-01-15."

That sentence is the whole story. The return exists. Conservancy says so, and gives the date. It is simply not linked.

The second place anyone looks is ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, which is where essentially every "what is X's revenue" answer on the web ultimately comes from. Its Conservancy page lists thirteen filings with structured data, ending at the year to February 28, 2023, and then a separate list of filings it holds but has not extracted. The year to February 29, 2024 sits in that second list: a PDF link, and no numbers.

The year to February 28, 2025 is not on ProPublica at all, in either list.

It is on the IRS. Conservancy's return for that year was received in 2026 and sits in the IRS Form 990 bulk XML archive under object ID 202640169349300604. The bulk download programme publishes an annual index CSV and a set of ZIP archives; the index row for employer identification number 41-2203632 points at the archive and the member file. Nothing about it is private or hard to reach. It is simply not where anyone looks.

So there are two filed years that no public source reports, and the freshest number the internet has for Conservancy is now two fiscal years old.

What I checked, and what passed

Before the interesting numbers, the boring ones, because a finding is only worth reading if the arithmetic around it holds.

I ran 63 discrete numeric checks across the three filings. 62 reconcile exactly.

• Part IX functional expenses: the individual expense lines sum to the printed total in 3 of 3 years.
• Part I revenue components (contributions, program service revenue, investment income, other) sum to total revenue in 3 of 3 years.
• Total assets less total liabilities equals net assets in 3 of 3 years, and the split between unrestricted and donor-restricted net assets sums to the same total in 3 of 3.
• Program, management and fundraising expense columns sum to total expenses in 3 of 3.
• Schedule D reconciles the audited financial statements to the Form 990 in 3 of 3 years, exactly, once every published reconciling line is included.
• The audited surplus equals the movement in net assets in 3 of 3 years, to the dollar.
• The restatement audit: 20 of 20. Every statutory return prints a prior-year comparative column, so with three filings, two years are published twice in two separate documents. Comparing ten Part I and balance-sheet lines across both overlapping pairs, all twenty agree. Nothing was quietly restated.
• Schedule A's five-year support table gives four further overlapping years per pair. 16 of 16 cells agree across both gift and gross investment income rows, and the five-year column sums to its printed total in 3 of 3 years.

The one exception is a dollar. Schedule A reports contributions for the year ended February 28, 2025 as $2,491,245; Part I and Part VIII of the same return report $2,491,246. Schedule A's own five-year total foots to its own figure, so the table is internally consistent; the two parts simply disagree by one dollar.

For what it is worth, Conservancy is visibly aware of this class of thing. Schedule D of the year to February 29, 2024 carries a one dollar reconciling item, and the accompanying Schedule O explains it in two words: "Rounding error." The equivalent line the following year is a one dollar "Loss on sale of securities." This is a set of books where somebody explains a single dollar.

Two correct revenue numbers

Conservancy's accounts are audited, which means Schedule D publishes a second revenue figure that is also correct and is not the same as the headline one. The Form 990 excludes unrealised gains and losses on marketable securities; the audited financial statements include them.

The sign flips. In the year to February 2023 the securities lost value, so the audited figure is the lower of the two; in both later years they gained, so it is the higher.

That is not a rounding curiosity, because it changes the growth rate you would quote. On the Form 990 basis, revenue fell 40.60% and then recovered 29.25%. On the audited basis, it fell 37.45% and then recovered 28.55%. Over the full two years the decline is 23.22% on one basis and 19.59% on the other. Both are correct. They differ by 3.63 percentage points, and which one you get depends entirely on which document you happened to open.

I could check the older of these against Conservancy's own published audit, and it holds exactly. The independent auditor's report for the year to February 28, 2023, signed by Eisenkraft CPA PLLC on January 15, 2024, reports total support and revenue of $4,057,961 and unrealised losses on marketable securities of $129,235. Both match the Schedule D figures in the filed return to the dollar. That document is a scan with no extractable text layer, which is presumably part of why nobody has quoted it.

What actually happened

Two things, moving in opposite directions.

Contributions fell off a cliff and then partly recovered. Donations and grants were $4,018,244 in the year to February 2023, $1,964,878 in the year to February 2024, and $2,491,246 in the year to February 2025. That is a 51.10% fall followed by a 26.79% recovery. Government grants were zero in all three years; every dollar is private.

Legal costs tripled, and kept climbing. Fees for legal services were $218,919, then $606,846, then $725,882. As a share of total expenses that is 5.98%, then 13.55%, then 19.08%. Almost all of it is booked as programme expense rather than administration, which is consistent with litigation being the programme rather than an overhead. Conservancy also now employs a general counsel, Rick Sanders, who first appears in the year to February 2024 with reportable compensation of $102,857, rising to $124,838 the following year.

The rest of the expense base moved to accommodate this. Grants to domestic organisations went from $410,485 to $16,963 to nil, the line disappearing from the newest return altogether, though foreign grants of $53,174 remain. Spending on internships in free and open source software fell from $967,340 to $487,483, a 49.61% cut, taking that line from 26.41% of expenses down to 12.81%. Software development and design spending fell 29.56%. Travel and conferences spiked to $527,140 combined in the middle year and then halved.

Put differently: the share of spending classified as programme services fell from 85.25% to 82.43% to 78.03%, while management and general rose from 10.96% to 17.84%.

The reserves number that matters

Conservancy's net assets at February 28, 2025 were $4,291,768. That figure, on its own, is misleading, and it is the one a data aggregator would print.

Only $1,006,678 of it is unrestricted.

Donor-restricted funds at Conservancy are largely member project balances: money given for a specific project, held by Conservancy as fiscal sponsor, and not available for general operations. At February 28, 2025 they were 76.5% of net assets.

The unrestricted balance, which is the part Conservancy can actually decide how to spend, fell 39.30% and then 27.83%, for a two-year decline of 56.20%.

I am not going to convert that into a months-of-runway figure. Total expenses include large amounts of member project spending funded from restricted balances, so dividing unrestricted reserves by total expenses would produce a precise-looking number measuring nothing. The honest statement is the one above: the free reserves more than halved in two years.

The pivot nobody has reported

The most interesting line in the newest return is small and easy to miss.

Program service revenue, which is earned income rather than donations, went from $30,239 in the year to February 2023 to $339,990, then $549,852. In the earlier year it was conference sponsorship, registration fees, honoraria and $14 of promotional item sales. From the year to February 2024 a new line appears: software development services, at $171,025, then $517,741.

Conservancy has, in two years, built an earned-revenue line from nothing to roughly half a million dollars, and it is now the second largest source of money in the organisation after donations. That is a strategic change of some significance for a charity whose funding model has always been described as donation-dependent, and it has happened entirely inside the two filings nobody has read.

The same return also carries a line reading "Proceeds from Litigation" at $2,376.

The claim everyone repeats

Search for Conservancy's revenue and almost nothing on the first page answers the question. The closest thing is a May 2023 Substack post, summarised in Google's own result as saying that Conservancy brings in more revenue than the Free Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and the FreeBSD Foundation combined.

I could not read that post. Its body is not served to a plain HTTP request, so what follows tests the comparison rather than the article, and I am not quoting or characterising anything beyond the one summarised sentence. On the data that was available in May 2023, the comparison holds.

The newest returns published for each organisation in May 2023 were Conservancy at $4,357,006 for the year to February 28, 2022, the Free Software Foundation at $1,352,816 to September 30, 2022, Apache at $1,765,183 to April 30, 2022, and FreeBSD at $1,005,053 to December 31, 2022. The three together come to $4,123,052. Conservancy exceeded them by $233,954, or 5.67%.

It is no longer true. On the newest figures now public for all four, the three total $4,711,995 against Conservancy's $4,187,196. On Conservancy's newest filed year it is $3,214,723 against $4,711,995, a shortfall of $1,497,272. Apache grew 31.05% over its own two comparable years while Conservancy contracted.

One caveat, and it is a real one: these four organisations have four different financial year ends, in February, September, April and December. No two of the totals above cover the same twelve months, and I have compared newest-available to newest-available rather than pretending otherwise. The direction is not in doubt; the precise margin is approximate by construction.

The claim was accurate, well sourced and reasonable when it was made. It has been overtaken by events that were not visible to anyone reading the public record.

What I could not determine

Conservancy has not published audited accounts for the years ended February 29, 2024 or February 28, 2025, so for those years the audited revenue figures above come from Schedule D of the returns rather than from a signed audit I could read. Both returns state that the accounts were audited and that an independent accountant's report exists.

I have not attributed the fall in contributions to any single donor or event. Conservancy reports no government grants and does not itemise donors publicly, and Schedule B is not part of the public file. Schedule A of the newest return shows that $4,274,380 of the trailing five-year gift total of $15,998,201, or 26.72%, was excluded as excess contributions from substantial contributors. That tells you the funding is concentrated but not who the contributors are. On the public support test itself Conservancy is comfortable: 71.05% against a 33.33% threshold, up slightly from 70.92% the year before.

I have also not named which member projects the restricted balances belong to. Conservancy's project list is not in a form I could read from a primary source, and guessing would be worse than leaving it out.

How to check this yourself

Nothing here required a subscription or a scraper.

1. Find the employer identification number through ProPublica's free search API. Conservancy's is 41-2203632.
2. Read the organisation's ProPublica record and look at filings_without_data before anything else. That list is the years the aggregators do not have, and therefore the years nobody has written about.
3. Stream the IRS index CSV for a given receipt year and grep for the EIN. Take the object ID and the archive name from the row. Note that the index year is the year the return was received, not the tax year, so a return for a February 2024 year end filed in January 2025 sits in the 2025 index.
4. Download the archive, extract the single member file, and read the XML.

The XML matters more than it sounds. Reading the filed XML rather than a scanned PDF removes an entire category of error: no column ordering to misread, no section headings that change name between years, no dashes that might be zeros.

We ran the same route over Let's Encrypt, where the filed return and the audited accounts likewise disagreed and the audited figure was the higher of the two. Ghost is the other non-profit in this series that publishes real numbers, by a different route again.