QGIS turned 20 last year. Help us get ready for the next 20+ years by becoming a sustaining member!
We want to ensure another 20+ years of sustainable development to keep on bringing the most user-friendly GIS to users worldwide.
This year (2023), we, therefore, plan to focus on addressing long-standing infrastructure debt (particularly docs and web infrastructure). To make this infrastructure more sustainable, we had to make the difficult decision to move funds from our annual grant program to rather support these infrastructure tasks. To enable us to bring the grant program back to full strength and to address upcoming challenges (including but not limited to Qt6 support and next-generation installers), we need additional funds. The best way to achieve this goal is to enlarge our sustaining member base.
Our existing sustaining members contribute €130k per year. We are aiming to raise an additional €70k per year (equivalent to 1 new flagship, 3 new large, 4 new medium, and 8 new small sustaining memberships) to bring the total member contributions up to €200k.
The campaign to raise funds for our activities runs from 16th January 2023 until 16th February 2023. (Update: now extended to end of March 2023)
Our funding progress so far:
To keep the lights on, become a sustaining member or donor.
Details: Sustaining Membership Program Overview
Every contribution counts.
If you need to convince your boss …
Executive summary
QGIS is a high-impact, global project. QGIS.org provides open access to best-in-class tools for visualizing, creating, editing, analyzing, and publication of spatially linked data and information products. QGIS.org does not prescribe how these tools should be used, but we make these tools freely available and accessible to everyone in the hope of fostering a more just society, better making, and furthering the goal of a more sustainable environment. Our cross-platform software is available on traditional desktop PC’s, on mobile devices, and in the cloud.
Who uses QGIS?
QGIS is used by governments, large multi-national organizations, corporate entities, and academic institutions all the way down to small businesses and hobbyist users. Our Open Source development model makes the software accessible to all of these users at a cost they can afford, excluding no one from the ability to benefit from QGIS.
QGIS is free of cost, not cost-free
It has taken, and will continue to take, a great deal of effort to develop high-quality tools like those provided by QGIS.org. Initially, this cost was borne exclusively through the efforts of dedicated volunteers. As the project matured, a financial ecosystem developed around the project. Customers began to contract community members to extend the QGIS project (software, documentation, online infrastructure) to better serve their needs.
In parallel with these directed funding efforts, we developed programmes for supporting the project with funds that we can use at our own discretion via donations and sustaining memberships. These discretionary funds allow us to provide all of the supporting infrastructure around the project. In addition, it enables us to fund:
- Quality improvements to the software,
- Host contributor meetings,
- Hire technical contributors to improve broad-reach elements of the project, and
- Grow the community around the project to strengthen its long-term sustainability.
A value-for-value model
Many of our users migrate to QGIS from proprietary alternatives which are financially unsustainable to use within their organizations. We celebrate the fact that we are able to open doors that would have otherwise been closed for those needing spatial tools such as QGIS. However, we also ask you to share some of the value gains that you realize from moving to QGIS with us. The funds you provide to us are used to the direct benefit of all users, who get to enjoy a more feature-rich, stable, and well-documented set of QGIS tools. This ‘value-for-value’ model helps to ensure the long-term sustainability and prosperity of the QGIS project. With nearly half a million daily active users, your contributions can make a huge impact on the lives of many people. The project has received in-kind and financial contributions from many well-known international organizations around the world, whom we thank deeply. We invite you to join the ever-growing number of organizations that see value in the work we do and share value back to us in the form of financial contributions to support our work.
Governance
QGIS.org is registered as a Swiss Verein (Association) that is operated in a non-profit manner. It is managed by an elected board and contributed to by hundreds of people from around the world. In the same way that the software we develop is open source, the project is operated with the same principle of openness, with all financial reports, board reports, and community decisions carried out in an open and transparent way.
QGIS.org blog 