Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser (opens in new tab)

For comparison, in the same year Rust Foundation spent $567,000 on this category - more than ZSF's entire expenses for everything. That's 38x more money.

Source: https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual...

This would not be wildly out of place for a small to medium business running a business card website. On the high end, certainly, but not unheard of.

But if it's also including the cost of all the CI and build steps for the entirety of Zig infra?

That seems pretty reasonable for me. Although maybe my cousin Katie could do it for 1/10th the price in WordPress

Given they bought their own machines to not perpetually pay cloud infrastructure...

Meanwhile, Debian spends $0 on CI, buildds, website, package distribution. Its all donated by hardware/CDN/hosting partners.

> Some of these costs were one-time costs to purchase machines that sit in our homes and offices

We don't know much of it was burned to cloud. Perhaps in 2026 report in will be $0 (or just electricity costs) because it all runs in-house.

Zig CI runs all compiler stages, I guess that's why. Does not seem crazy to me.

There are projects that spend more than that every day.

How so?

Hello, I am the author of the post.

The expenses listed here are accounting for 100% of the expenses paid by the organization. If you go fetch the 990 from the IRS and look at the totals, it will match dollar-for-dollar, cent-for-cent. So if I deleted taxes from this report, you would hopefully all be wondering, where did that $13,089.07 go?

Happy to answer any other questions.

Edit: I see the question is about income tax vs payroll tax categorization. As this isn't my area of expertise and it's getting late, I'll wait until tomorrow to check carefully and make any necessary clarifications.

In the USA at least, the employee pays taxes on their wages and the employer, also pays some taxes on the employee wages as well.

Been awhile since I employed anyone in America (that whole "we're going to annex you" thing) but if I had to hazard a guess, it's the company's portion of their FICA taxes? The company withholds the employee portion to remit to the IRS, then matches it dollar to dollar. If the company is structured so that Andrew is self-employed, it'd be SECA instead and you can count that portion as a business expense.

At a very high level, revenues enter your bank account and expenses leave your bank account. In this case, you are getting confused about the taxes. There is employee compensation (which the business will withhold taxes on behalf of the individual) and then payroll taxes (which the employee is not responsible for). In essence, "their taxes" is not the correct classification. The business pays the employee (and facilitates the tax collection) and also pays the tax the business owes.

> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. (Not saying it's undeserved.)

There's an article somewhere on the rationale of Andrew's salary. From the top of my head it was based on an median lead developer salary in the area.

Honestly that seems fair, obviously less than he would have in the private sector, but still high enough to not burn out and have a comfortable life.

> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed.

Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).

> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?

Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).

What's even more wild, was reading the complaints and condemnation of competing language creators for having supporters give them donations. It's a much different tune, when one's own pocket is fat with donation money. Wish people could be happy for the success of others and not only themselves.

Reading this, it feels like putting my hand in acid :)

I’m sure there are many people that would happily donate more so he can make more for his work. Which I had the budget to donate atm

Keep in mind that payroll taxes aren't going to him, he may only be paying himself something like 120k which is a fraction of what he'd making working for $BigCorp

that doesn't account for personal income tax

> Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?

Not at all. We would be definitely open & happy to learn that one of the big companies are using Zig and would be interested in supporting us.

(but we don't plan to give up board seats)

Since it's not a 1.0, it seems at face value it's be difficult for a "big player" to use it in production. As far as I understand, breaking changes are expected.

I think the ambition is much larger than what could be accomplished by part-time volunteer work. It was either this or somehow get a bigcorp to dedicate 2, 5, 10 full time salaries to it.

Honestly it's not clear to me that the money they have in income now is enough to accomplish the ambition, but I guess that's why it is a fundraiser in addition to a financial report.

Made an effort to improve that this morning. How's it looking for you now?

…because of “ZML” - what is this?

Very relevant - why all the bad blood?