Let’s talk about the 2025 FPA grant program: what projects were voted for, what projects weren’t, and what we think needs to change for this year’s program.
2025 grants
Last year, we got 46 grant applications. We voted ‘yes’ on 31 of them and ’no’ on 15. Here is a quick explainer:
- Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 are quarters of the year
- declined: grant applications that weren’t voted for
- OO: grant applications for the separate Ondsel Onwards fund
The average grant request was approximately EUR 3,650 with a median of EUR 3,000, and a highest request of EUR 10,500.
Here is the breakdown by quarters, with conversion to EUR where applicable:
- Q1: EUR 25,590
- Q2: EUR 24,085
- Q3: EUR 30,630
- Q4: EUR 15,200
The total allocated budget was EUR 95,505. Note that this includes EUR 17,125 drawn from the separate, privately sponsored Ondsel Onwards fund, as opposed to the general fund built from community donations. This makes the total budget allocation under the planned EUR80K cap.
Grants completion
Out of 31 grants approved in 2025, work on 11 has been completed. Please note that Q4 2025 grants were approved in mid-December, so we expected at least some of the work to be completed in 2026.
For detailed information on the status of approved grants, please see the respective GitHub project managed by Reqrefusion, the grant program’s communication manager.
Program Analysis
The grant program was originally designed to serve two overlapping purposes:
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Distribute donations to developers
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Encourage development in specific areas identified by FPA members
To the extent that one of the purposes of the program is simply to distribute donor money to those working on FreeCAD, the program succeeds reasonably well. 19 different individuals received money through this program in 2025. It is not a perfect way to distribute the funds, but it is not unreasonable.
Regarding encouraging development in specific need-areas, however, the program is much less successful.
With over two-thirds of grants funded, we applied little “selection pressure”. It was rare for either an FPA member or a grant review committee member to vote to decline a grant on the basis of whether a proposal met some targeted need-area: most “no” votes were “value for the money”-based, with a few coming on the basis of whether a given feature proposal represented something we needed at all, not whether it fit into a larger plan, as well as some hesitation to fund out-of-core development work (e.g. addons).
Another problem the grant program experienced was a grant review team that provided very little feedback. In many cases, reviewers provided simple yes/no comments on grant applications. Further, even when provided with committee feedback, FPA voters seemed to find little value in it, instead forming their own opinions independent of any comment from the committee.
Recruiting reviewers also proved difficult: despite several vocal individuals on the forums expressing opinions about how the FPA spends the grant money, none of those people volunteered to serve on the committee.
2026 Program Modifications
Here is what we are likely to change for the 2026 program:
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The budget for the grant program should be reduced to EUR 40,000, divided into EUR 10,000 quarterly grant rounds. The freed-up budget should be used for the bug bounty program and ongoing positions.
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The technical grant review committee should be eliminated.
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The FPA should choose some small number of actionable focus areas for each year’s program to help guide which applications should be selected (and voters should take care to respect that selection).
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Grants should be limited to one application per developer per quarter.
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A “no” vote on a grant should require a statement from the voter about why they are voting no, and that feedback should be anonymized and provided to the grant applicant with the notice of their grant’s being declined for funding.