Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

Related recent news, the 0.15.1 release with the start of some IO changes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701

A masterclass in clear writing and transparency. I wish all nonprofits were like this.

I know literally nothing about business accounting or business taxes. Why does the expenses include both the employee's compensation and also their taxes? Do businesses claim their employees taxes as expenses?

Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.

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.

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.

i think the question is more of "is that payroll/employment tax"? the way it's written uses the word "income tax" carefully noting the distinction. you may want to edit it to say "payroll tax", which makes more sense.

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.

> CI & Website $14,986.73

What a waste of money, seriously

I think I understand from the other comments. I never considered that it is technically an expense to withhold the income taxes of employees and then pay it to the IRS.

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

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that number is not actually employee income tax, even though the report seems to suggest the same. Employee income tax is an expense of the employee, not the employer. If it is income tax withholding, it's way too small for $150k+ of employee comp, which is another reason I don't think it's that. Instead, I expect this tax line item to be primarily the employer share of FICA tax, which is typically considered a payroll tax instead of an income tax.

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

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...

The report says that includes two full-time infrastructure engineers. Which isn’t crazy given Rust infrastructure’s userbase and traffic.

$15k seems pretty lean to me for Zig since it includes hardware purchases.

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.

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

>That's 38x more money.

Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig, so their infrastructure costs are not as bad in comparison.

Zig team didn't want to be beholden to the whims of outside sponsors which is an understandable position.

How so?

> Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig

1. I highly doubt your ballpark estimate.

2. I don't think CIs care that much how many users a language has, they care about the number of computations they need to run for each commit/merge.

What’s the role of LLM coding on Zig?

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

Kudos to bun for investing in a promising technology.

Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?

Otherwise the lack of sponsoring from the "big players" seems rather shocking. You'd think that zig has a decent chance in helping MS/Meta/Google/etc. somewhere along the way.

It's also the one-time cost of buying some machines, not just renting.

So in practice money is effectively being donated (donating hw is not free) to be spent on CI, not very differently than in our case, but you're delighted to not know the numbers and like to imagine it's $0. Ok :^)

> 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)

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

> we need more recurring donations

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

There are projects that spend more than that every day.

I don’t think that ballpark estimate is that far fetched? Usage isn’t a reflection of the merits of the two languages. Rust is simply older. It reached 1.0 10 years ago, and it is further along the adoption curve. Zig is yet to reach 1.0 and has mostly early adopters like bun, TigerBeetle and ghostty. I have no doubt that usage will substantially increase once Zig reaches 1.0.

To give you a sense of Rust’s growth, check out this proxy for usage (https://lib.rs/stats). Usage roughly doubled each year for 10 years. 2^10 = 1,024. It’s possible Zig could manage a similar adoption rate after reaching 1.0, but right now it’s probably where Rust was in 2015.

> CIs don’t scale with the number of users

Each Rust release involves a crater run, where they try to compile every open source Rust repo to check for regressions. This costs money and scales with the number of repos out there. But it is true, this only happens once in 6 weeks.

But I think the factor that makes a bigger difference is that Rusts code bases are larger and CI takes longer to run on each commit.

In every Zig thread, someone needs to mention Rust /s.

> is that Rusts code bases are larger

And Rust compilations are much slower too.

> 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.

crater runs are constantly running [1]. Every time there is a PR with any danger of causing a regression a crater run can be requested.

[1]: https://crater.rust-lang.org/

there is still payroll tax on top of that though, snd c3s are not exempt

My mistake, sorry!

"Even with a 13% bigger budget, we still managed to spend 92% of our money in 2024 paying contributors for their time."

The Zig Foundation model of paying contributors is really interesting. I don't think I've seen it done on this scale before, but hope it takes off.

1000x seems low to me.

Rust is used in production by many companies out there.

I think you're a little too angry about this.

that doesn't account for personal income tax

> 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).

oh 100%.

I am just annoyed that every time Zig developers publish some articles or even make some comments here on HN they always contain something negative about someone else.

Like even in this thread when someone said that Zig wastes too much money on infrastructure the first thing Andrew Kelly does is to show that Rust spends much more.

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.

Nice breakdown but renders awfully on Safari Mobile/iOS

The longevity of donation platforms is a major concern for us and GitHub has not been good in that sense.

GitHub Sponsors has not seen a single improvement in the years after its launch (despite us and other organizations chatting with GitHub employees about critical missing features), and GitHub Actions has been tragicomically buggy, clearly showing that software engineering infrastructure is not GitHub's core focus anymore (on top of, you know, the CEO explicitly saying that GitHub is an AI company now).

Related https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792

Since we do see ourselves eventually migrating away from GitHub (at least in some form), we would like to steer donations towards a service that we have higher confidence in.

The transparency and clarity is something others should attempt to model in my opinion. If a child can understand it, then what does it hurt to be childish in the report? As a professional I wish more would report in like fashion.

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.

Can't wait for Microsoft to release Zag in 2027.

> Why?

Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations. The salary he could get in a private company has no effect on that.

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

Fair point.

…because of “ZML” - what is this?

Very relevant - why all the bad blood?

Yeah, makes sense, 1.0 is probably a critical point for a project like this, where from it, "big players" start trusting its business to the lang and therefore having a high interest on funding.

But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem: they need more money to keep doing its great work and thrive to reach 1.0 but good money comes from 1.0 and beyond.

It's kinda sad the state of things where startups with only buzzwords and slop (I'm looking at you horoscope AI app) end up raising more money than actual tech projects that will, actually, improve infrastructure and innovation.

> 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.

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

I just read AndyKelley's comment you mentioned, and I can't find anything wrong with it; it's not even saying anything negative about Rust. It just observes that Rust spends more.

Is $100k/year a good salary? Depends. For a software engineer, no, since most software engineers make more. For a paramedic, yes, since most paramedics make less.

To know if $15k is a lot to spend on CI and a website, a great way to answer that question is to look at what peers spend on the same thing. Hard to think of many better peer comparisons for Zig than Rust.

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.

To continue with your metaphor what he did is basically say "My salary is great because I make more than that other guy". That doesn't mean anything.

The comparison to Rust is meaningless.

Each project has different demands and requirements from their infrastructure.

For example, Rust compiles all open-source crates on a regular basis to test for regressions.

You can't just point to Rust and say, "Look at that guy."

If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.

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

Baseless accusation. Do you by chance have affiliation with a "competing language"?

checks profile

there it is

> Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations.

Big ones do! For example, Python/JavaScript/Linux. Some are developed by companies (e.g. Go/Java/Kotlin). Seems perfectly sensible that companies using Zig would donate to the language...

> Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations.

It's not unheard of. Eg, Blender earns $261,360/month. (https://fund.blender.org/) Companies should more eagerly support open source projects they rely on with funding. It keeps their dependencies competitive with much more expensive commercial products, and a broad base of donations prevents a project from being dominated by specific large corporate interests which might run counter to their average user.

Is that a US thing only? Because this sounds like double taxation. An employee have to pay Income tax, which is normal and standard across the globe, but employer also have to pay another "income tax" for its employees on top of pensions, medicals and others ?

As your other comment was flagged to death, no I'm not kidding you. I don't use Zig (or indeed Rust) so I don't have any particular feeling about the personalities or relative merits of the languages, other than that they are inferior because I don't like them as much as my favorites.

I think it's a good report because it's very clearly written and I was able to pick up a great deal of information about their financial situation/dynamics from a quick scan of less than a minute. I think if you're asking people for money, having a very high signal-noise ratio like that is optimal. I can read other formats (eg I have been browsing nonprofit form 990s for many years), but I like communication that is short and to the point.

It's not an income tax, it's a payroll tax. and there is nothing in general saying you can't double-tax. plenty of double taxes in the us.

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

>The comparison to Rust is meaningless.

>If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.

And they did. Comparing to anything is how a normal human would judge whether the spending is relevant. It is call price comparison. Whether it is a valid comparison is up to the person to decide. And more often that not when the two pricing are so vastly different that person should look a little deeper.

Hi Andrew - From an PR perspective, I think now that zig have enough attention it may be better to stop doing comparison with or even mentioning Rust.

Rust was hated not because of Zig or any other languages, but their Rust Evangelism Strike Force. Some day these comparison may back fire. Zig can stand on its own now, and already quite widely known. May be best to have peace rather than war.

Just my ( may be useless ) 2 cents.

Also agree with this. I don’t see rust and zig that similar. People building it, governance behind it, use case and just overall vibe.

Don’t find myself choosing between rust/zig after using them both a decent amount

Agreed. The leaders of Zig should stop bringing up competitors unless specifically relevant.

The RESF became unbearable because Rust leaders quietly encouraged language wars online, and especially offline. Zig should avoid that fate.

Rust is not hated. Rust is a widely loved and successful project, growing more popular every year.

There's no war here, only facts that help an ignorant person gain perspective about how much things cost.

They are still dependent on sponsors, just ones that donate cash instead of resources.

That's true but I'm pretty sure that the goal is to have a large number of individual sponsors. A handful of large corporate sponsors can later try to use their sponsorship to exert unwanted influence over the project.

> "competing language"

Just a consumer. Hope that it is ok to choose or like something else. Please don't be angry. If it counts for anything, fine with things going well for you.

> "Baseless accusation"

No sir, not baseless. At one time, the pocket watching of competitors was real and they getting just $927/month (figure from your .me site and many other places) from their happy fans and loyal supporters seemed too much to bear.

Now that one's personal pocket is fat with $12,500/month, perhaps we can hope to see good will and grace extended to others besides one's self. The world is big enough for creators to be professionally respectful of each other and to allow consumers to choose what they like.