Pillowfort 10-Year Funding Review

[anacedragon]

As you may have heard, Pillowfort users are currently celebrating the site's 10th anniversary! Although the site launched for the first wave of beta users in February 2017, Pillowfort had its first round of fundraising on Indiegogo in April 2016, and that's the date we're using for this anniversary. To mark the occasion, I wanted to do a proper review of Pillowfort's funding over the years.

In prior posts, I've shown that although Pillowfort has struggled to get adequate funding on a consistent basis, it has been successful each time it has come to its users with a targeted ask for fundraising. I've also given further background on where Pillowfort's funds come from and where they go in my post from last year, so I won't get too deep into those details here. If you want more detail, I invite you to check out the other pages on my website or to reach out in the comments on Pillowfort or Dreamwidth!

In this post, I'm going to recap some history about the ways Pillowfort has raised the funds to cover its operating costs, then I'll get into some analysis of the actual funding amounts over the past 10 years.

(Crossposted to Neocities and Pillowfort. For the best formatting, I'd recommend viewing the post on Neocities, but please leave comments here or on Pillowfort!)

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Funding Model

Pillowfort is, and always has been, entirely user funded. To quote their regular fundraising posts,

100% of funds donated to Pillowfort go toward keeping the lights on and to compensate our staff working on the platform. We don't have venture capital, we're not owned by billionaires, and we don't have an angel investor. We're an entirely user-funded platform.

There have been a few methods of raising funds over the years: crowdfunding campaigns, purchase of registration keys, user donations, and premium subscriptions.

Crowdfunding

We have some pretty good insight into Pillowfort's funding at the beginning, because until late 2019, public crowdfunding campaigns were the primary way that Pillowfort raised money to support itself. The May 2016 Indiegogo campaign raised about $5,240, which sustained site operations through launch in 2017 until their next successful crowdfunding campaign in August 2018, a Kickstarter that raised over $57,000.

Registration Keys

Pillowfort also allows prospective users to donate $5 in order to get an account registration key. Originally, those donations were handled via PayPal, but around March 2019, PayPal closed Pillowfort's account without warning because the site allows explicit content. Shortly afterwards, the site switched to Authorize.net as their payment provider, allowing them to continue accepting donations from people who want to create an account.

User Donations

In November 2019, Pillowfort added a dedicated donation page for existing users to donate to the site. About a year later, in January 2021, they added a monthly budget breakdown to the donation page, which remains to this day (though the amounts have changed slightly over the years, as I break down on the Budget page on my website). Just under a year after the budget was made public, Pillowfort added the monthly funding percentage to the sidebar, making it visible to all users from the main feed. From 2021-2025, the funding percentage was updated on a daily basis; starting in April 2025, it now updates on an hourly basis.

Premium Subscriptions

The last big change to the funding model for the site was in April 2023, when Pillowfort Premium launched. Premium introduced a set of paid features, including multiple avatars, higher image uploads, and additional avatar frames. This was the first time Pillowfort was accepting funds for something other than a registration key or a pure donation, aside from crowdfunding rewards. The intent of launching a premium features suite was to build a more sustainable stream of revenue by giving users a tangible reason to pay the site on a regular basis.

Another thing to note here is that Pillowfort had intended to launch the Premium suite much sooner, but it was delayed in order to develop new anti-harassment features (e.g. Concealed Mode) instead. This goes to show their commitment to users and their safety, rather than simply chasing the most profitable features in the short-term.

Trends over Time 

Drawing on the data I've collected since April 2022 and the amounts from the crowdfunding campaigns mentioned above, here are the highlights of what we know:

In 2016, Pillowfort raised about $5,200 via Indiegogo. In 2018, they raised over $57,000 via Kickstarter. In 2022, they raised about $60,000 via donations and registration keys. In 2023, they raised about $66,500 via donations, registration keys, and premium subscriptions. In 2024, they raised about $69,000, and in 2025, they raised over $81,000.

To dive deeper into this, I've created a set of graphs that show a bit more clearly the trends over the past four years, along with some of my own analysis.

Year-over-Year Trends

This first graph is a box-and-whisker plot showing funds raised per month, aggregated by year, from April 2022 - December 2025.

The purpose of a box-and-whisker plot is to show the distribution of data. This is represented by the box, which contains the median and the middle 50% of the data, and the whiskers, which extend out to the minimum and maximum values (excluding outliers). The plot below also includes the mean (the dotted line) and a representation of the individual data points (the dots next to each box).

_{To see the interactive graphs, check out the version of this post on my website.}

First, there are a few trends that I want to point out about the revenue per month.

One trend is that the average revenue per month has been increasing since 2022, and the median has been increasing since 2023. This shows that Pillowfort is bringing in more money on average per month than it used to. This is also reflected in the annual revenues I mentioned above.

Another revenue trend is that the range of monthly revenue has been getting smaller over time, and there are fewer outliers in recent years. This is apparent visually from the size of the box, but to put some numbers to it, 2022 had an interquartile range (which contains the middle 50% of the data) of $2,465. That same range was $1,878 in 2023, $960 in 2024, and $666 in 2025. Similarly, the overall range (maximum value minus minimum value) was cut in half from 2024 to 2025 alone ($1,649 in 2025 vs. $3,147 in 2024). This indicates that the amount raised per month is more consistent than it used to be.

_{To see the interactive graphs, check out the version of this post on my website.}

Looking at net income, the trends are slightly different. Note that I calculated net income by subtracting the monthly budgeted expenses from the month-end revenues, so it may vary slightly from the actual net income. The monthly budget has changed over time, mainly because of changes in staff compensation for increased or reduced hours.

Average net income has hovered above and below zero for the past few years. We know from the emergency fundaiser announcement in November 2023 that Pillowfort had been operating at a loss overall for several years, which we can see reflected in the graph: average net income was below zero in 2022 and 2023. 2024 finally saw a positive average net income, but 2025 was back in the negative. The reason for that, even though revenue increased from 2024 to 2025, is that monthly expenses also increased. The funding goal increased from $5,000 per month to $7,000 per month in October 2024. That's $24,000 over the course of a year, so even though revenue was up by $12,000 from 2023 to 2024, that wasn't enough to keep net income above zero.

Individual Month Trends

Now, I want to take a closer look at trends per month. For this analysis, I have two graphs. The first one is similar to the graph above, but it aggregates the data by month instead of by year, allowing us to see cyclical trends within each year. The second one is a bar chart showing the revenue, funding goal, and net income per month, which shows trends for individual months over the years. The data for both is the 48 months from April 2022 - March 2026.

In my opinion, the revenue graphs are more useful to analyze on this monthly basis because that's the side of the equation that users have control over and because the changing budget amounts make it hard to compare net income like this. That said, it is still important to look at the net income because even if revenues increase, if they don't increase enough to match the budgeted expenses, then we're still in hot water.

_{To see the interactive graphs, check out the version of this post on my website.}

At this point, you might be wondering "whoa, what's up with November?" There's a few reasons November has had such high revenue in the past few years. The reason it was relatively high in 2023 is that the two-month Emergency Fundraiser was launched in November 2023, and most of the $25,000 was raised in the first 30 days. The reason it was so high in 2022 was actually nothing to do with Pillowfort itself, but rather because of a huge influx of interest in alternate social media platforms after a series of unwelcome changes were made to Twitter and Tumblr. Even setting those outliers aside, November and December have been pretty consistently well performing months, though the view is more positive for revenue than for net income since the funding goal was increased in late 2024.

As far as overall trends, the bar chart shows that every month except for November and September had revenues significantly higher in the most recent year of data (April 2025 - March 2026) than the first year (April 2022 - March 2023). November is an outlier because of the Emergency Fundraiser, as explained above, and the reason September was so high in 2022 is actually because of a different fundraiser, the Autumn Fundraising Drive. We can also see that individual months tend to increase their revenue from one year to the next, with some exceptions.

I also want to point out some months that have had relatively low revenues in the past few years. June hasn't quite had the lowest revenue on average, but it has had the lowest maximum revenue over the past four years. February is in a similar boat, with the second lowest maximum revenue over the past four years. Those are the only two months that had a maximum revenue lower than the current funding goal of $7,000.

Revenue Stability

I also want to note that, while we don't have official figures for this, the hourly funding updates do give us some insight into the amount of funds that currently come in on a recurring basis. There tends to be a disproportionate amount of donations between 4 am and 6 am every day, so that's when I assume recurring subscriptions and donations are charged by Pillowfort's payment processor. Following that assumption, just under half ($39,720 out of $82,160) of the funds raised between April 2025 and March 2026 were from a recurring subscription. If a larger proportion of site revenue was recurring, that would create more stability and allow Pillowfort to better plan for the future.

To that point: If you've been enjoying Pillowfort, whether for 10 years or for 10 days, and would like to see it stick around, I would encourage you to check out the Premium Suite and consider throwing in an extra recurring donation. I would also encourage you to opt for a monthly subscription rather than the 3-, 6-, or 12-month option, if that's financially doable for you.

Why does it matter? Because unlike many larger social media companies that want your money now in order to use it on other projects or financial investments, Pillowfort uses the money it raises exclusively in order to pay its bills. If we raise enough to cover expenses for the current month, then the extra money goes into reserves; if we don't fully cover expenses, then they have to dig into those reserves in order to pay their bills. So getting each month closer to reaching the goal on a consistent basis means relying less on those reserves, and means less uncertainty for Pillowfort. And if we can consistently reach the current goal, then the site can consider increasing staff hours in order to work on features that have been in the pipeline for a long time. Having a more stable source of revenue would make that decision less of a gamble, which is why I encourage folks to sign up for a recurring donation if you can.

Final Thoughts

While Pillowfort's revenue isn't entirely stable, there have been some promising trends over the last few years. Average revenue per month has been increasing steadily, with the most significant increase being from 2024 to 2025, and those monthly revenues have been getting more consistent over time. Comparing revenues to the budget, we have missed the target 9 out of the last 18 months since the goal increased. To put that in perspective, though, all 18 of those months would have met the previous $5,000/month goal, which Pillowfort struggled to meet only a couple years ago.

And most importantly, since Pillowfort is user-funded, that means we are the ones who control whether or not the goal is met. You may not think that donating an extra dollar a month makes a difference, but those small amounts add up. Remember, the average net loss per month in 2025 was only $421. Bringing that up to zero would only take 421 people giving $1, or 85 people giving $5, or 28 people giving $15. Or 47 more people signing up for the full Premium Suite (currently $8.97/month). And if you can't afford to subscribe, or don't have a way of doing so: just keep using the site, and let your friends know what you like about it.

The site's future is in our hands, and consistently reaching the monthly funding goal isn't very far out of our reach. I believe that if we keep that in mind, we can make sure Pillowfort will still be around for another 10 years.