Stoutner

Programs that respect your privacy

2020 Financial Report

Revenue
  • Google Play: $388.14
  • Stripe: $126.74
  • PayPal: $82.67
  • Patreon: $56.05
  • Bitcoin: $52.10
  • Amazon: $44.78

Total revenue: $750.48

Google Play revenue comes from selling the standard flavor on Google Play. Stripe revenue comes from Liberapay donations. PayPal comes from Liberapay donations, selling the standard flavor on XDA Labs, and from direct donations. Patreon revenue comes from Patreon donations. Bitcoin revenue comes from Bitcoin donations. Amazon revenue comes from selling the standard flavor on Amazon Appstore.

Google AdMob ad revenue only pays out when the balance exceeds $100.00. Currently the balance is $98.09, which is up from $84.71 at the end of 2019. The amount of money the ads make is quite minimal, and dropped significantly when the passage of the GDPR gave me the option of forcing all the ads to be non-personalized. I have considered getting rid of the free flavor entirely, but I feel like it provides a nice way for users on Google Play and similar platforms to check out all the features of Privacy Browser before deciding if they want to spend money.

At the very end of the year, I received $56.25 in donations via PayPal, and a total of 20.1 mBTC, which is currently valued at $620.42 (this number has increased three times just while I have been drafting this post). These donations are not reflected in the numbers above because they have not been transferred to my business bank account. They will be included in the 2021 financial report.

My goal is to eventually quit my day job and work on Privacy Browser full time. To be able to do that, the amount of money it generates would have to increase by two orders of magnitude.

Install Base

Google Play reports some fairly detailed statistics about installations. The other distribution methods (F-Droid, XDA-Labs, the Amazon Appstore, the Galaxy App Store, and direct downloads from Stoutner.com) either do not track this information or provide only vague information. The screenshot below shows the installs of the standard flavor on active devices on Google Play, which is defined as the “Number of Android devices that have been active in the past 30 days with the application installed”.

This year the number of active installs crossed over 1,000 for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, even though there are far more installs of the free flavor, there are fewer active devices. This is because most users either decide they don’t like Privacy Browser, or they switch to using the standard flavor.

It tends to hover in the 200 range.

In the future F-Droid is going to implement some install metrics, similar to Debian’s popularity contest. It will be interesting to see what those numbers show.

Last updated

Soren Stoutner

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13 responses to “2020 Financial Report”

  1. i’m commenting from the f-droid version. it’s my daily driver and i can’t be satisfied more.
    wish i could donate to this worthy project as well. currently i’m looking into the bitcoin option since here, in iran, they’ve banned any kind of financial transactions due to the sanctions.

    very much appreciated. keep it up man 🙂
    regards

  2. What do you mean by “To be able to do that, the amount of money it generates would have to increase by a factor of two.”? You only need $1500 a year to quit your job and work on this full time?

    • That’s funny. You are correct, that was a typo. I intended to say two orders of magnitude and somehow typed factor of two. I have updated the post to reflect the correct mathematical term.

  3. Hey,

    First, thanks for keeping this alive.
    I don’t remember if I said it or not, but I would not be contrary to you having some money coming from Startpage search engine as long as it was a simple deal. “Startpage is default search engine in Privacy Browser, you get paid X amount every month”. No tracking or specialized URLs. I understand your reasons not to do it, but you could gone that way and I would still be a loyal fan 😉

    That being said, I hope you don’t drop support for older Android versions. I have a couple devices still running those and Privacy Browser is a true bless in those.

      • I read that post the day you posted it 🙂
        I only think if it had no software side implications, and since you are using Startpage as the default search engine anyways, I would have understood that choice. I would not understand it as a user if there was whitelisting of trackers going for example. But for a simple inclusion you are doing anyway? Yeah, no problem on my part 🙂

        That being said, you show honorable and clear path choices and that is why I trust your software so much.
        Great work!

        • I am actually currently testing MetaGer as a possible replacement for Startpage. When and whether that happens depends on how well MetaGer works. It becomes impossible to look at search engines honestly once you have a financial tether to one of them.

    • The place to make feature requests is at https://redmine.stoutner.com. However, regarding themes, Privacy Browser uses Android’s Day/Night theme, which only has two options. The night theme follows the Android system color scheme, which is dark but not pure black. Note that, contrary to popular belief, there is very little system power savings between a dark theme and a completely black theme on an AMOLED display, because most of the battery is being consumed on the CPU, GPU, RAM, etc. See https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mode/.

  5. Hi, been enjoying Privacy Browser for years. Would you consider accepting donations in Bitcoin Cash in addition to Bitcoin? We, Cashies are a friendly bunch. Feel free to ask away on reddit.com/r/btc