2024 Annual report and 2025 plans
This document contains a report of the 2024 activities of the FreeCAD Project Association AISBL (FPA), as well as a plan for 2025. The FPA is an international non-profit association formed by core FreeCAD developers to manage donations received on behalf of the community and to maintain and develop the FreeCAD project.
Foreword
2024 was a very active year for the FPA. Founded in late 2021, 2024 was the FPA’s third full year of activity. For the first two years of the organization’s existence, a key area for growth was developing strategies for spending the donations we were receiving in a responsible and useful manner because we realized how hard it actually is to spend money! In 2025, with the re-launch of the FPA Development Fund grant program and the creation of several ongoing support roles, spending is finally on track and roughly matching the donations received in the previous year. This spending not only benefited the direct recipients of the funds. Much of it was directed towards projects that benefited all developers, paid and volunteer alike.
FreeCAD is a project by users, for users. The reason it exists and grows is because users take part in its development. It is part of our mission at the FPA to keep that process healthy and enjoyable, and for users to always feel it is their tool.
Paid development also brings in new people, new ideas, a new development pace, and exciting new perspectives. This is something everyone in the project is learning to work with, and the FPA endeavors to use its funds in ways that ultimately benefit everyone who uses FreeCAD.
The race to finish and release version 1.0 of FreeCAD was a hectic one, consuming developers’ time for most of the past year. The FreeCAD community processed, reviewed, and merged a huge number of contributions. Everyone sought to make the release as perfect and powerful as possible, while still actually getting to the finish line, and making FreeCAD 1.0 a reality. The FPA contributed by funding grants in several key areas (such as mitigation of the topological naming problem), and creating support roles such as a “bug triager” to help manage the large volume of bug reports.
For next year, the FreeCAD development team wants to take a slower pace, and concentrate on solidifying everything, refactoring, refining development processes, and keeping FreeCAD as the tool we have all come to love. The FPA will support this through funding in four key focus areas outlined later in this report.
Thanks to everybody who has helped build what FreeCAD is today: the most complete and powerful Free, Open-Source 3D CAD program available.
2024 report
Version 1.0
The major achievement of 2024 is, without a doubt, the release of FreeCAD version 1.0. Version 1.0 required a huge effort from the whole community, many lines of new code, hundreds of bug fixes, and an extended, six-month-long feature freeze. The reception to it is overwhelmingly positive.
Although this was clearly a whole-community effort, the FPA is proud to report it has done its part to help the effort by helping to refine the requirements for the release, and funding development in key areas such as toponaming mitigation or UI issues. See the grants section below for more details, and see the official announcement for more details about version 1.0.
FPA top 5
At the beginning of 2024 the FPA identified five major focus areas for the coming year. Although, of course, none of them can be called “done”, as nothing is ever really “done” in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world, we are proud to report that we made significant advances in all five areas:
-
Mitigation of the Topological Naming Problem (TNP): The work originally started by developer Realthunder as part of his “LinkStage3” fork has been merged into FreeCAD, thanks first to an organizing effort by the team at Ondsel, then by a continuous effort led and sponsored by the FPA to finish the merge, and implement a comprehensive test suite to make sure everything works. Although that does not mean all the problems are gone, FreeCAD now has a solid mitigation solution in place. Developers should now be able to use it to address specific remaining TNP issues that are still encountered.
-
Integrated Assembly workbench: Although FreeCAD could already count on several very good 3rd-party assembly add-ons, looking at other CAD packages demonstrated that having a basic integrated assembly feature was the industry standard. Actually implementing an integrated assembly workbench was complicated by a lack of LGPL 2.1-compatible 3D constraint solvers. Again, thanks mainly to Ondsel who gathered the needed resources and people, FreeCAD now has such a solver, and a default, included assembly workbench that uses it. The role of the FPA here has only started, as we continue to fund initiatives to develop this assembly workbench.
-
Improved accessibility and user experience (UX): The FPA has been active in setting up a Design Working Group, funding that group to upgrade their knowledge of UX questions, and starting to participate and write about UX. The idea here is not to try to “solve” anything, as we understand such a thing does not exist, but rather to get everybody who contributes to FreeCAD to educate them about common guidelines and to use them. Thanks to that effort, we have already seen a tremendous improvement of the FreeCAD UI. The work needs to continue, of course!
-
Having a FreeCAD-wide Materials system: An integrated materials system that is used throughout FreeCAD, by all the different workbenches, and that could handle many different use cases (physical properties, aspect properties, or even rendering properties) is now a reality. Although this has been a community effort, it was led by the incredible efforts of developer Dave of DavesRocketShop. The FPA helped by giving his work the attention of other developers and making its inclusion into the FreeCAD code as smooth as possible.
-
Better documentation: The FPA has pursued different efforts to improve the documentation by exploring different forms like the developers handbook, giving grants to people to work on the documentation, and upgrading the FreeCAD manual for version 1.0. We have also explored different options to make our wiki documentation better and easier to translate and keep in sync with FreeCAD versions. This is, of course, ongoing work; much more needs to be done, but we are moving in the right direction.
Developer grants
In 2024, the FPA awarded a total of USD 82,350.00 to developers, some through the grants program, where developers propose a job themselves, and some through direct job calls where the FPA proposes and seeks interested people. Some of the jobs below are still underway, find more details and the full proposals on the grants proposals repository:
| Grantee | Proposal | Area | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| bgbsww | Toponaming issue mitigation | FreeCAD code | USD 4800 |
| CalligaroV | Toponaming issue mitigation | FreeCAD code | EUR 3400 |
| marioalexis84 | Bugfixing and electromagnetic system simulations using CalculiX | FreeCAD code | USD 4000 |
| bgbsww | Toponaming issue mitigation | FreeCAD code | USD 5000 |
| Francisco-Rosa | Design new components for the FreeCAD library | Ecosystem | USD 5000 |
| jnxd | Refactoring Sketcher | FreeCAD code | USD 5000 |
| Andrianos Karampilis | User manual update | User docs | USD 2500 |
| drLite35 | Improve the FreeCAD API documentation | API docs | USD 4000 |
| pieterhijma | Improve C++ API Documentation | API docs | EUR 8000 |
| bgbsww | Toponaming issue mitigation | FreeCAD code | USD 5000 |
| ipatch | Update homebrew-freecad tap | CI and builds | USD 2000 |
| bgbsww | Support debugging FreeCAD C++ and Python from CLion and VSCode | FreeCAD code | USD 1500 |
| pieterhijma | Research Variant Parts | FreeCAD code | EUR 8000 |
| oursland | CI Hosting Research Proposal | CI and builds | USD 500 |
| FlachyJoe | Bugfixes for v1.0 | FreeCAD code | USD 1000 |
| Reqrefusion | Recommendations and proposal for the improvement of documentation | User docs | USD 3000 |
| pieterhijma | Improve User Experience of VarSets | FreeCAD code | EUR 8000 |
| Amrita team | Content and Pedagogy Development for Teaching and Learning FreeCAD | FreeCAD code | USD 6000 |
| Obelisk | Modernize, revise FreeCAD Art Guidelines and Icons | UX and design | USD 1750 |
| kadet1090 | Unified Transparent Previews | UX and design | EUR 1500 |
It is with great regret that we say farewell to Brad “bgbsww” McLean, who died in late 2024, and whose contributions were invaluable to the Toponaming project (among others). He received several grants from the FPA, and we worked closely with him throughout the year. FreeCAD 1.0 is dedicated to his memory, and his contributions to the project will live on in the work of everyone who enjoys the model stability that his work was instrumental in providing.
FreeCAD development ecosystem
A key role of the FPA is to support improvements to the tools and environment used by developers and other contributors - the development ecosystem. The FPA performs this role not only by paying grants to developers, but also by putting things in place that help all contributors, paid or not paid, to do their work better, and, even more importantly, to have fun while doing it. We all work on FreeCAD mainly because it is enjoyable, and at the FPA we want to make sure this continues and gets even better. To that aim, we started or continued different initiatives:
-
Bug triage maintainer: The FPA now funds a bug triage maintainer, Max, who is doing an incredible job in keeping the issues list active, clean, and making sure all submitted problems get the needed attention. There is now literally a “before Max” and “after Max” at FreeCAD.
-
Release maintainer: The FPA continued funding and extended the role of Adrian as a release manager. Adrian is now taking care of all the packages and installers on all platforms, making sure FreeCAD works everywhere, and is also taking care of bugfix releases which are done from time to time after main releases.
-
Forum and community guidelines: As the FreeCAD community grows, so too do community problems grow. The FreeCAD forum and other places where FreeCAD community members gather, sometimes suffer from members not behaving the respectful way we would all love to see always. This has made some potential new members avoid the forum because they do not see it as a safe or friendly enough place. Although this is a delicate question where there is no magic solution, we are working on, and are determined to keep working on, bettering the situation. Among other things, we have revised the community guidelines, made it easier for people to find who to talk to in case of problems, and are trying to get more forum moderators and help alleviate the load on the shoulders of the few heroes who volunteer to do that job.
Conferences and meetings
In 2024, the FPA organized two meetings where developers and community members could meet in person: The FreeCAD day 2024, held in Brussels in January, together with FOSDEM, and the North American Meetup in Springfield, Illinois, in July. We see these events as highly beneficial for the project, as the exchange of ideas and the user feedback that can be had in in-person meetings is always highly valuable.
Financial report
The FPA is in an even stronger financial position than it was a year ago. As of the end of 2024, we had over €200,000 in assets and only a small debt of €2,000 for quarterly VAT charges (which was retired in early January 2025). Donations almost doubled as compared to 2023, while spending increased by almost 400%.
| 2023 | 2024 | Delta | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assets | 133,000 | 211,000 | 78,000 |
| Liabilities | 0 | 2,000 | 2,000 |
| Receipts | 106,000 | 186,000 | 80,000 |
| Spending | 26,000 | 99,000 | 73,000 |
We continue to rely on PayPal, GitHub, and OpenCollective to collect and forward donations to FreeCAD. As noted in last year’s report, at the end of 2024, we wrote off approximately €4,500 in donations held by BountySource as unrecoverable due to its parent company’s bankruptcy.
We also receive direct deposits to our account at BNP Paribas
There was a noticeable upturn in donations at the end of 2024. Hopefully, this will continue in 2025.
As usual, our spending concentrated on grants, events, and maintaining our online presence.
Regulatory Reports
As a micro-AISBL, under Belgian regulations, the FPA is require to produce two financial reports each year. These reports are described here: “Annexe 8 : Schéma des comptes annuels des associations et fondations qui tiennent une comptabilité simplifiée.”.
L’Etat des recettes et dépenses
Financial goals for 2025:
- hire a bookkeeper/accountant
- grow reserve accounts to maintain a level of 20% of assets
- improve tracking of spending against the budget
- improve payables handling
FPA membership changes
In 2024, the FPA roster saw a few changes: obelisk79 and oursland joined the team of members, while the current administrators team has been retained for another period of 2 years. In total, 54 proposals have been approved by the FPA members in 2024.
2024 Progress Assessment
In the 2023 annual report, we laid out several goals for 2024:
- Increase spending: In 2023 we struggled to spend our budget. The grant program was in its infancy and developers were generally unaware of the available funding. In 2024 this situation was remedied and we succeeded in spending up to our budget. This is due in part to a much more successful grant program, and in part due to the creation of several funded roles, as discussed above.
- Increased FPA participation: In 2023 we identified a need to increase participation from FPA members to handle the growing demands of the organization. In 2024 several new members joined, and others left, but on the whole the participation of FPA members in meetings and voting deliberations has improved from the levels seen in 2023. This is an area we need to continue to focus on.
- Reviewers for grants: In 2023 we expressed the need to form an independent grant review committee. That was formed in 2024, though it was not wholly independent of the FPA as several FPA members also serve on the committee, including the chair. In the long term we would still like to increase community involvement in this committee.
- Forum moderators: In 2023 we suggested that the FPA could assist with the labor shortage among FreeCAD Forum moderators. While several possible tacks were discussed, no specific action was taken, and this continues to be an area for concern as part of our broader effort to foster a healthy development community.
- Educational outreach: In 2023 we mentioned our continuing struggle to engage with the education market, and this continues to be a focus area for 2025. We assisted in the creation of a dedicated forums section for educators, but significant work remains to grow that community and to engage with them to foster the use of FreeCAD in educational contexts.
2025 plan
With the release of FreeCAD 1.0 in late 2024, the FPA began evaluating what the next areas of focus for funding initiatives should be. After polling the community and collating the results, a new set of priority areas was identified. These priorities will be used to evaluate grants and to guide the development of new recurring funding projects to support FreeCAD.
FPA top 4
For 2025, the FPA has identified four key focus areas that we particularly encourage developers to focus their efforts on, and that will be prioritized for grant funding.
1. FreeCAD’s position within the larger FOSS ecosystem
FreeCAD depends on many other FOSS packages. Additionally, FreeCAD’s users often use FreeCAD in conjunction with other FOSS tools.
The FPA would like to improve FreeCAD’s relationships with these packages by directly supporting development, meetups, and other collaborative efforts. For example, FreeCAD is currently dependent on packages such as OpenCASCADE, Coin3D, and Qt. FPA funding can be used to develop bug fixes and features for these projects.
FreeCAD users often work with other packages, such as KiCAD and OpenFOAM. FPA funding can also support the development of improved interoperability through add-ons or directly in FreeCAD. Development work on other related projects is also eligible for support.
It is often beneficial to interact directly with the development teams of these other related projects, so FPA funding can be used to support things such as meetups, conferences, dedicated online gathering places, etc.
2. Developer experience and effectiveness
Improving the development experience and developer effectiveness is critical to the long-term health and stability of the project. There are many different facets to this focus area, but broadly it can be broken down into several main components:
- Improve onboarding
- Documentation
- Mentorship
- Encourage development in key areas
- Strategic features as identified by various working groups (e.g. the Design Working Group and CAD Working Group)
- Testing
- Improve code quality and readability
- Adding tests (unit, regression, integration, etc.)
- Refactoring
- Modernizing
- More human testing of pull requests
- Better separation of business logic from UI
- Keep the merge process lean, fast, and predictable
The FPA will prioritize funding of grants that fit into one of these areas, and will work with Maintainers and Developers to encourage focus on these targets across the broader development community.
3. User Experience
User experience is a common pain point in FOSS, and FreeCAD is no exception. Over the many years of its development many different individuals have worked on parts of the overall user experience, but only recently has a dedicated group been formed to focus on the unification of these disparate pieces of the FreeCAD ecosystem. “User experience” encompasses more than the user interface of the software itself, and the FPA will focus on improving many different aspects in the coming year:
- Pre-software experience (forums, website, social media)
- Bug reporting and resolution
- UI
- Standard workflows
- Documentation
- Typical CAD workflows / CAD advisory group
- Better support of multi-document assemblies
- Support of collaborative document creation
- Training/Certification
4. Standards compliance
Standards compliance is critical to making FreeCAD more useful in professional contexts. The FPA continues to foster development in this area, including by purchasing the relevant standards and stewarding developer access to them. These standards, which focus particularly on Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), can extend to other important standards as identified by relevant working groups, such as the CAD Working Group.
Grant program
The FPA Development Fund grant program is one of the main mechanisms the FPA uses to distribute funding to individual developers. While FreeCAD is nearly 100% volunteer-developed, the FPA aims to encourage and support FreeCAD’s development team by spreading collected donations amongst the group to defray some of the costs of contributing time to the project. At the current budget level, the FPA cannot fund full-time development on FreeCAD. However, it can give individuals small amounts of money to contribute to their work.
In 2024 we successfully relaunched the grant program, and FPA members voted to approve total grant funding in excess of €85.000. While this represents a substantial and much-needed increase in funding allocation, it also demonstrated that the current structure of rolling grant applications was difficult to budget: €50.000 had been allocated for the program. While this overrun was not problematic from a cash flow standpoint, it does suggest that our budgeting and tracking needs to improve.
A secondary problem with the grant program was its unpredictable timing. There was a wide variability in the amount of time it took a grant to go from initial presentation to final funding.
Finally, because of the rolling schedule throughout the year, it was impossible to effectively prioritize grants. Each was reviewed independently as it arrived, which didn’t allow comparison between the grants in order to manage focus areas.
To address these issues, the grant program is being restructured for 2025: rather than operating on a rolling basis, the 2025 program will have four deadlines throughout the year, with a set review timeline following each deadline, and a set funding budget of €20.000 for each period (€80.000 total budget). This will allow explicit comparisons of one grant to another, and the selection of those that best fit the FPA’s funding priorities. This will lead to an inevitable increase in turnaround time for most grants as they sit waiting for the deadline to arrive. But it should prevent the budget overrun we experienced in 2024 and will mitigate the other problems mentioned above.
Financial plan
Spending Forecast
| 2024 Actual | 2025 Planned | Delta % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| FPADF awarded in 2024 | 40,500 | 41,050 | 1.4% |
| FPADF to be awarded | 0 | 80,000 | 100.0% |
| Ondsel Onward | 0 | 40,000 | 100.0% |
| ecosystem Support | 14,700 | 24,000 | 63.37% |
| new ecosystem resources | 0 | 17,000 | 100% |
| blog/Website | 9,200 | 13,200 | 43.58% |
| Events | 16,500 | 10,500 | -36.46% |
| Remuneration | 4,600 | 5,000 | 8.70% |
| Financial Institution Fees | 8,900 | 10,000 | 12.46% |
| Contributions to reserves | 20,000 | 10,000 | -50.0% |
| Total | 114,400 | 250,750 | 220% |
Revenue Forecast
In 2024, we received some large donations that we do not expect to be repeated in 2025. In light of this, we are forecasting a modest increase on the base of our 2024 receipts less extraordinary items.
| 2024 Adjusted | 2025 Planned | Delta % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Donations In | 145,000 | 160,000 | 9.1% |
Donations appear to be on the rise after the release of v1.0, but at this point, we do not know if this is an anomaly or a trend.
While we plan on spending more than we take in in 2025, we have more than sufficient spendable assets to cover planned spending.
Maintaining an excessive bank balance is not compatible with our role as a non-profit organization, so dipping into our spendable assets is an appropriate action.