Pillowfort Financial Notes Spring 2025

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

Pillowfort is doing a lot better than it was when I made my last big post about its finances! We met the $25,000 goal for the 2023 emergency fundraiser with funds to spare (raising a total of about $26,750); all but two months in 2024 met their funding goals, even after the goal was increased by $2,000; and every month so far in 2025 has brought in more funds than any month in 2024.

In this post, I want to give some additional background on Pillowfort's budget and funding strategy and I want to emphasize how well the site has been doing since my previous post. So let's get into it!

Hold on, where did you get these funding numbers?

I'll start out with my usual disclaimer: I am not associated with Pillowfort Staff, and all my analysis is based on publicly available information.

Pillowfort has been transparent about its finances for a long time. In 2021, Pillowfort added a counter to the sidebar that showed the percentage to the current funding goal, updated daily. This percentage represents the funds contributed by site users during the month, as Pillowfort does not accept outside funding (more on this later). I started tracking this percentage manually in May 2022. I have the data listed here on Excel Online. I also have a number of graphs and further information hosted elsewhere on my Neocities.

Until April, the last percentage visible in the sidebar funding counter each month was the second-to-last day, not the last day, so that's the final number I have for most months before 2024. But some months, including very consistently since the Emergency Fundraiser, Staff have also reported the final amount that settled to their bank from the credit card processor, which is sometimes slightly higher or lower than the amount shown in the sidebar counter. Plus, as of April 9, 2025, the sidebar funding counter is now updating hourly, which means the final number shown going forward should be much closer than the second-to-last-day figure, but may still not be exactly the amount Pillowfort actually receives.

Where do Pillowfort's funds come from?

Pillowfort does not, and never has, accepted funds from venture capitalists, angel investors, or advertisers. The site is entirely user funded, and this isn't likely to change. This allows Pillowfort to prioritize the user experience (e.g. not hosting disruptive ads or selling user data) and continue hosting content that larger sites eventually almost always ban (e.g. NSFW content). This does cost them, however: credit card processing fees are higher for Pillowfort because they allow NSFW content, and it limits their options for accepting contributions. For example, PayPal ended their relationship with Pillowfort, and their current payment processor, Authorize.net, is incompatible with many international credit and debit cards.

Therefore, to meet its monthly funding goal, Pillowfort relies entirely on users contributing money to the site. Initially, this was accomplished through big crowdfunding campaigns, then by requiring users to pay a $5 fee to get a registration key, then by creating additional paid features, and eventually will include paid post promotions.

...And where do they go?

Pillowfort's funding goal is set each month based on the site's budgeted expenses. The goal has changed several times over the years, mainly due to changes in compensation as staff hours have been increased or decreased. The budget also includes hosting, storage, and other miscellaneous fees, though the budgeted amounts for those items have stayed nearly the same for as long as I've been tracking them. (Further detail on the breakdown can be found here.)

The last change to the budget, in October 2024, increased the overall goal from $5,000 to $7,000, which is very close to the highest budget the site has ever had. I've seen some concern over the past few months about why Pillowfort would increase its funding goal by so much if they only recently started breaking even on the old budget. The short answer is: because they hired a new developer, so staff compensation costs increased.

They hired a new developer in order to speed up development on the Progressive Web App and upcoming Paid Post Promotions, along with a number of other features and bugfixes. And why is that important enough to warrant increasing the budget by nearly 50%? Because both of these features are intended to increase Pillowfort's income. The Progressive Web App is something Staff has talked about for a long time as something they hope makes Pillowfort appealing to people who only want to visit the site on mobile. Attracting more users makes the pool of potential Premium subscribers and one-time contributors bigger. And Paid Post Promotions are a direct revenue stream, as users pay to get their posts on the dedicated page for promoted posts. Other upcoming features (like the reworked image uploader) aren't directly revenue-generating, but they do improve Pillowfort for existing (and new) users, which may make them more likely to give money to the site.

What has changed?

Although Pillowfort often struggled to meet its funding goals prior to the Emergency Fundraiser, thankfully that has changed. If you look at the dollar amount of funds raised instead of just the percentages, Pillowfort is doing better than ever: the average monthly income is almost twice what it was when I first started tracking in 2022!

From 2021 through 2023 (as I covered in my previous post), the months that ended up bringing in enough funds to cover expenses were months where either Staff put on a fundraiser or other social media sites had issues large enough that users jumped ship and bought a $5 registration key for Pillowfort. In fact, most months in that time brought in less than $4,000, and there were only 5 months from May 2022 through October 2023 (a period of 18 months) that brought in more than $5,000.

But in November and December 2023, Pillowfort raised almost $27,000 in 60 days, and starting in 2024, Pillowfort has been consistently either reaching its goals or coming very close to it: Every month from February through September 2024 raised over $5,000, and every month since October 2024 has raised over $6,000!

It may be discouraging that we didn't hit the funding goal for December through March, but averaging 97% of the second-highest funding goal Pillowfort has ever had is a big achievement, especially compared to the amounts it was routinely bringing in before the Emergency Fundraiser at the end of 2023. And I think a big reason we've been getting closer is that we've started up a pretty robust culture of posts like those in the Pillowfundraising or PillowFunds (or Pillowfunds After Dark [18+]) communities encouraging other users to contribute funds to the site at various times during the month.

Where are we now?

The last time Staff gave an update on their reserve fund was in February, when they said they had about $20,000 in reserve funds. That was enough to remain online until June even if future operations were "at a complete loss", meaning no further funds come in at all (and funds have clearly continued to come in). Since February, Pillowfort's net loss (income minus budgeted expenses) has only been about $800. That means we still have at least $19,000 of reserve funds, which covers close to 3 months of operation on its own. Compared to where we were in November 2023, when we needed to raise $25,000 to break even on 2 years of operations, we're still in a very good place.

At time of posting, it's a new month, and we're on a two-month streak of meeting the goal again! If you're in the position to subscribe to Premium or donate on a regular basis, I encourage you to sign up for a recurring subscription early in the month, especially if you've been chipping in towards the end of the month regularly to make the proverbial line go up. The funding percentage went up by a lot in the last two days of the month, and it would be nice if some of those donations come in earlier this month so we aren't all holding our breath to see if we'll meet the goal.

Now what?

Well, if you're excited about any of the features in the pipeline (see the Pillowfort developer blog for a current list), you should check out some of those fundraising communities above, or consider subscribing to Premium or just throwing a few bucks Pillowfort's way! Even a dollar from a lot of people is helpful for meeting the goal. But as always, if you aren't in the financial position to donate, or if you can't because of technical limitations, don't sweat it.