11 Years of BookStack

Dan Brown Dan Brown posted on the 14th of July 2026

It feels like time is zooming by with the project now hitting its 11th Birthday! Following our annual tradition, I’ll go over the current finances and figures for BookStack.

Financials

The below chart shows monthly project income since 2022, which was when I focused on BookStack full time. The bars are split by revenue source. This is just income, so excludes costs, fees, taxes and many other expenses.

Stacked bar chart tracking monthly revenue in British Pounds (£) from January 2022 to mid-2026. The income is categorized into GitHub Sponsors (blue), KoFi (teal), and Support Services (orange). While GitHub Sponsors provides a steady baseline of £1,000–£2,000, Support Services drives major periodic spikes, pushing total monthly revenue to peaks over £10,000 and showing a general upward growth trend over time.

Tracking the last 12 months to the prior, average support service revenue has risen 47%, going from £2,521.88 to £3,715.68. GitHub sponsors have risen by 20% going from £1,670.42 to £1,996.24. KoFi revenue has slowed by 22%, going from £274.83 to £214.92.

Compared to last year, support has overtaken GitHub sponsors as the fastest growing revenue source. As always, the donations & sponsorships provide a consistent foundation which the more volatile support service income sits upon.

Overall, this reflects a continued healthy increase in monthly revenue. A big big thanks to all those who have donated, purchased support services, or sponsored the project. It’s incredible I can continue to gain a decent income for a project like this, while ensuring it’s provided fully free and open source.

Donation Forwarding

Last year I mentioned having doubled frequent monthly donations to around £225 per month, with the intent to grow this further. My monthly GitHub sponsors bill is now at about £367. Upon that, I have also donated various one-off amounts for supporting services, helpful open communities in related ecosystems, vulnerability rewards, and to projects/people who don’t accept GitHub sponsors.

Of course, I plan to increase the donation forwarding further over the next year to align with the increase of my own revenue. I’ll get my 2026 taxes sorted, then go through and increase many of the existing sponsorships to better help fund those whose work we rely upon.

Sponsoring Media

Recently I’ve been thinking about sponsoring and supporting some of the media channels in the self-hosted/open-source community space, especially those which have supported BookStack over the years.

I’ve been wary about getting involved with this, being concerned about influencing the relationships/views/coverage that the project may receive, but at the same time it would be good to support various media channels that are important within the self-hosted space.

It would also be interesting to explore this as an avenue for project discovery, so we have options in the event our existing sources (eg. natural searches, mentions on Reddit) become limited.

If you have views/experience/opinions on this, I’d very much welcome your input on this thread in the BookStack community forum.

BookStack, In Numbers

As usual we’ll dive into the project numbers, but what’s not usual are some of the significant changes to our platforms this year. This year we’ve:

So keep these changes in mind when reviewing these figures.

The below figures were collected at the time of writing (14th July 2026), with changes in red/green reflecting change upon last year’s numbers.

Codeberg

In our migration to Codeberg, all existing GitHub issues, PRs and releases were migrated.

GitHub

As mentioned above we have now migrated to Codeberg, but the GitHub repo remains alive acting as a mirror, so will still receive forks and stars:

Social

Website Analytics

Main bookstackapp.com site only, averaged over the last 90 days:

  • 1844 unique users per day +54
  • 4014 page views per day -50
  • Operating system breakdown:
    • 57% Windows +2%
    • 18% Mac -1%
    • 8% GNU/Linux -1%
    • 8% Android -1%
    • 7% iOS/iPadOS -2%

Our full website analytics can be found here.

CrowdIn (Project Translations) Numbers

  • 52 languages
  • 8,943 words to translate +264
  • 500 project members +57

Thoughts on the Numbers

With Codeberg being a much smaller site than GitHub, I’m not expecting to see the same level of stars and forks, but it’s great to see some activity in that area. What I’ve liked to see there is that many of those starring the project are new to Codeberg, indicating that the project may be encouraging others to get on Codeberg.

The reduction in PeerTube channel followers seems odd. Not sure what’s going on there. I wonder if there’s been a sync issue or some blocking across the Fediverse which has caused a bunch of followers to drop off.

Website activity appears to have flattened off. This may be a reflection of the recent release cadence, lack of external marketing/references, or maybe a change in how the web is now used, but I’ll have to keep a closer eye on the wider metrics here to see if this persists.

Further Reading

Here are the non-release/update posts that you may have missed over the last year:

Header Image Credits: Photo by Giles Laurent (cc-by-sa-4) - Image Modified

Want to let me know what you think of BookStack or this post?
You can find me on Mastodon @danb@fosstodon.org or in the BookStack Community.

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