KDE Surpasses 2025 Fundraiser Goal With Record Community Support

In the open-source ecosystem, funding has long been a central challenge, often determining whether a project can grow sustainably or slowly fade away. And while many initiatives continue to struggle for financial support, it’s encouraging to see others, like KDE, not only maintain a stable foundation but even surpass expectations.

I say this because, according to the latest data, KDE has surpassed its 2025 fundraising goal by a wide margin, reaching €276K—an impressive 276% of the original €100K target. Updated daily, the campaign’s progress bar now stretches far beyond its intended limit, reflecting an exceptional wave of support from users and contributors across the open-source community.

KDE hits nearly €276K as 2025 fundraiser breaks expectations.

The additional resources are expected to support ongoing work across the KDE ecosystem, including Plasma development, application updates, infrastructure improvements, and long-term maintenance efforts.

Compared with the 2024 end-of-year campaign, the difference is notable in both scale and outcome. In 2024, KDE’s public fundraiser had a goal of about €30K and raised roughly €54K.

By contrast, the 2025 campaign set a higher standalone target of €100K and has already collected €276K, reaching 276% of its goal through the fundraiser alone, underscoring a significantly stronger and more concentrated community response.

Alongside the fundraiser, KDE is also running its “Adopt an App” initiative, which allows individual supporters to visibly back specific KDE applications. By donating €50 or more, contributors can choose an app to adopt, with each app limited to five adopters. Once adopted, the supporter’s chosen name—real name, nickname, or social handle—appears on the app’s page on apps.kde.org until the release of KDE Gear 26.04 in April 2026.

Finally, I’d like to say that despite this year’s outstanding fundraising results, it would be great to maintain this momentum and even build on it, as this, as we all know, helps ensure the continued smooth and sustainable development of one of the best desktop environments in the open-source ecosystem. So, if you are able, please consider donating and supporting the KDE project.

For more information, see the 2025 KDE fundraiser page.