[[!meta date="Mon Oct 13 17:00:00 2016"]]
[[!meta title="Why we need donations"]]
[[!tag announce]]

Today we are starting a donation campaign to fund our work in 2017.

Unlike most other tools on the Internet, Tails comes for *free* as in
*freedom*. We are not selling your data, sending you targeted advertising, nor
will ever sell our project to a big company. We give out Tails for free simply because
everybody deserves to be protected from surveillance and
censorship. But also because being free software is a necessary requirement for
our tools to be safe, and protect you as intended. If our source code was
closed, there would be no way of actually verifying that our software is
trustworthy.

[[Since 2014|doc/about/finances]], we raised 210'000€ on average each year, coming from:

  - People like you
  - Private companies like Mozilla or DuckDuckGo
  - Foundations and NGOs like Hivos and Access Now
  - Entities related to the US government like the Open Technology Fund (OTF)
    or the National Democratic Institute (NDI)

[[!img income.png link="no" class="margin center" alt="Related to US
government: 34%, Foundations & NGOs: 34%, Individuals: 17%, Companies:
15%"]]

We often hear complaints about the fact that many
software projects that are meant to fight surveillance, like Tor and
Tails, get a lot of funding from the US government whose own surveillance
projects are severely criticized. We completely share this concern and
we will worry about our accountability and sustainability as long as the
survival of our project depends on a few small grants, some of them coming from
organizations linked to governments.

Now, we would like you to think about it: where should our funding come from?

The answer is clear to us: the survival of Tails should be guaranteed by our
users themselves, so that in return, we can continue to use our money in their
best interest, with complete independence.

From [[anonymized statistics|support/faq#boot_statistics]] on our website we know that Tails is used by around
18 000 people every day. **If each of them gave 12€, the price of a USB stick, our
budget for the whole year would be raised within one day.** As you can see, funding Tails through donations
is a realistic and our budget ridiculously small compared to the multibillionaire
companies and agencies running the surveillance business.

But many of our users could actually get in
trouble if they donated to an anti-surveillance tool like Tails. So when donating to Tails
you are also [[helping all of these people|news/who_are_you_helping]] by keeping Tails alive. Please
consider setting up a yearly or monthly donation.

If you want Tails to remain independent, please take one minute to make a donation.

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