In-depth founder interviews, MRR journeys and post-mortems, with the real numbers.
140 posts
A composite founder diary. A dormant $49 a month account resolved to a sanctioned jurisdiction after 26 successful charges. The statutory maximum reads as $9.8 million, the real base is $26,000 or $637, and the 40.8x gap turns on one condition buried in OFAC's own definition of voluntary.
QGIS.ORG booked EUR 428,260.48 in 2024 against EUR 370,906.17 in 2023. All twenty-two income and expense columns across eleven financial reports foot exactly. The 2020 report is the one year whose bottom line does not, and its 2026 budget counts EUR 80,000 of reserves as income.
A composite founder diary. A demand letter valued four years of California subscription revenue at $284,610 and called it an unconditional gift. The statute said something narrower, and something worse: the 2024 amendments reached the whole existing book, not just new signups.
Blender Foundation booked EUR 3,106,361 in 2024, up 21.7%, and ran its first deficit in the published record. Twelve of the fourteen financial columns across five annual reports add up exactly. The two that do not are both in the newest one.
A composite founder diary. A Delaware annual report notice arrived for $102,215 against $52K MRR. The real figure was $850, and the notice was not an error: Title 8 section 503(b) makes the Authorized Shares Method the statutory default until you report your issued shares and gross assets at the time of filing.
The Godot Foundation's two financial reports, read together. Revenue up 62.6%, surplus down 71.3%, and a note that names four revenue categories while publishing a value for none of them.
A composite founder diary. My Stripe 1099-K reported $561,300.00 in a year my bank received $528,217.80. The form was right: 26 CFR 1.6050W-1(a)(6) defines the reportable amount as gross 'without regard to any adjustments for ... fees, refunded amounts or any other amounts.' Here is the $33,082.20 reconciliation, why the $20,000 threshold everyone quotes does not apply to direct card payments, and what typing Box 1a straight onto a return would have cost.
The Document Foundation raised EUR 1,976,825 in donations in 2025, up 42.1%, held spending flat and banked a EUR 718,654 surplus, its largest ever. Weeks later LibreOffice shipped its first in-product donation banner. Here is the full 11-year series from the foundation's own ledgers.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $49K MRR a letter of intent valued my company at four times ARR, and eleven weeks later a quality of earnings report put the price at $1,162,960 instead of $2,352,000. Why ARR overstated my trailing twelve month revenue by $70,700, why the two year recurrence test killed most of my add-back list, and the line I had never once thought about: the market salary I never paid myself, which cost more than the revenue restatement, the add-back fight and the deferred revenue combined.
Mentimeter reported SEK 598.0 million of net revenue in 2025 and its first profit since 2020. It also produced positive free cash flow in four of the five loss-making years before that. Here is the full audited series, assembled from the filings for the first time.
A composite founder diary (2026): at $48K MRR a competitor cloned eleven of the fourteen sentences on my landing page, comma splice included. A DMCA takedown notice got the page down in six days, and a counter notification put it back on the table on day nineteen. Why the CDN was the wrong recipient, why copying expression is actionable when copying features is not, and the arithmetic nobody publishes: ten to fourteen business days to file a lawsuit against a copyright registration that was averaging about four months.
Scoro's filed revenue ran EUR 10.43M (2022) to EUR 16.62M (2025) and the group booked its first ever profit in 2025, EUR 374,000. The Estonian and UK filings reconcile to the euro, the register leaves the profit cell blank, the UK copy is an unreadable scan, and both aggregators on page one are high by 20% to 30%.
