[[!meta date="Mon Nov 2 12:34:56 2016"]]
[[!meta title="What we do with your money"]]
[[!tag announce]]

In our last post we explained [[why we need donations]]. Today we're
telling you more about how we use these donations.

In 2015, we spent around 184 000€, distributed as follows:

[[!img expenses.png link="no" class="margin center" alt="Releases &
foundations: 25%, New features: 23%, Help desk: 16%, Infrastructure: 13%,
Administration: 12%, Meetings: 10%"]]

- Even without building anything new in Tails, publishing our
  **releases** every 6 weeks is a lot of work as it also implies fixing
  the problems found in previous versions, documenting the changes,
  migrating to newer versions of Debian, GNOME, and Tor Browser, and
  making sure that the **foundations** of Tails stay relevant. As the
  schedule of emergency releases is unpredictable, they are hard to fund
  through grants and we instead usually rely on donations.

- Developing **new features** is not the biggest share of our
  budget. They are almost exclusively covered by grants or developed by
  volunteers. Since 2015, new features that were not funded by grants
  included:

  - Integrating the *Electrum* Bitcoin client.
  - Replacing *Vidalia* with *Onion Circuits*.
  - Continue working on a new version of *Tails Greeter*.
  - Mentoring a Google Summer of Code on *Tails Server* to allow running
    onion services from Tails (websites, collaboration tools, etc.).
  - Adding an offline mode that disables all networking.
  - Adding support for `obfs4` Tor bridges.
  - Writing numerous additions to our website and documentation.

- Our **help desk** is helping hundreds of Tails users each month. Each
  user request costs us 6€ on average to proceed. In 2016 our help desk
  was paid entirely out of donations.

- Organizing our own **meetings** and attending conferences in our field
  is critical to keep our community alive and relevant. But this is
  usually hard to get funded by grants, so donations help us a lot here.
  Since 2015, we attended more than 15 international conferences on free
  software (DebConf), Internet freedom (IFF), hacking (32C3), human
  rights (RightsCon), and journalism (Logan CIJ). And organized more
  than 10 internal in-person meetings and development sprints.

- In 2015, we worked a lot on **infrastructure**, for example to write
  an automated test suite to verify continuously the well-functioning of
  our ISO images, to automate the build of development ISO images for
  testing, etc. This work is invisible to the user but, for example,
  makes it much faster to publish emergency releases when we discover
  serious bugs.

- Keeping Tails successful also implies quite a bit of
  **administration** to raise funds, do accounting, organize work, write
  reports, etc.

- Since 2015, we added Farsi and Italian translations to our website and
  worked on the prototype of a web translation platform
  to allow more translators to contribute and more diverse people to use
  Tails.

If you like our work, please take one minute to keep Tails alive.

<div id="donate-button">[[Donate|donate#what]]</div>
