This is a very short summary of the 2025 financials of Couchers, Inc.: the 501(c)3 non-profit that supports Couchers.org. Check out also last year's post on 2024 financials.

You can donate to support the project by logging in and going to the Donate page!

What we spent money on

Couchers spent $2988.34 in 2025, equivalent to 4.5 cents per user, the breakdown of costs is as follows:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — $2024.92 (67.7%): hosting of the Couchers.org platform and development/support/moderation tools
• Printful — $379.73 (12.7%): producing Couchers.org branded merch (these are largely offset by donations in excess of merch fees)
• Vercel — $201.07 (6.7%): hosting developer previews of the platform
• TechSoup — $95.00 (3.2%): nonprofit technology services and software licenses
• Zoom — $75.78 (2.5%): videoconferencing platform for volunteer meetings
• Expo.dev — $75.00 (2.5%): a development tool to automatically build and deploy preview versions of the native app
• Banking Fees — $72.00 (2.4%): bank account maintenance fees
• Calendly — $40.50 (1.4%): meeting scheduling platform we use to organize volunteer onboarding calls
• Twilio — $20.00 (0.7%): phone services for number verification
• Porkbun — $4.07 (0.1%): domain registration
• Google Cloud — $0.27 (<0.1%): cloud services

Where we received money from

Couchers received $7223.71 in total revenue in 2025. Of this, $6267.46 came via Stripe (our payment processor) and $956.25 came via other means (checks, etc). Via Stripe, we processed $6510.86 of donations and paid fees of $218.49 (3.4%), with a slight discrepancy between Stripe and our bank account due to timing. Larger donations have a lower per-transaction fee (if you would like to make a large donation, we can issue a one-off invoice for a bank transfer that has practically no fee).

There were 183 unique donors. 114 donors donated $10 or less, 54 donors donated more than $10 but $50 or less, and 15 donors donated more than $50. The six donors who are on the board donated 53% of the total. Aapeli and Itsi donated $1000 each at the beginning of the year as we were running out of cash, luckily our donation drive towards the end of the year brought in more (in our v1.2 release post we mentioned we brought in roughly $2k less than the numbers in this post due to removing these two large donations from the totals there). We hope to diversify and bring in a larger share of our revenue from donors outside the board.

You can donate to Couchers via the donation page when logged in.

Account balance

We started the year with $574.67 in the bank account and ended it with $4810.04, with donations covering all of our operating expenses: a major step towards financial sustainability.

Outlook for 2026

We are very happy about the significant increase of our balance sheet from the end of last year, moving us into a more stronger financial position.

The past year has been very active for us: we have had a serious amount of development and volunteering happening, with the release of our last Beta version (v0.9.9), of course our official v1 release, and two more feature releases: v1.1 and v1.2. We are glad to have the money to support our volunteers, operate the platform, and plan for future expenses in service of our community members (present and future).

In 2026, we expect our cost structure to stay roughly stable. We aim to do some cost optimization with hosting, such as moving some auxiliary services to Hetzner, thus reducing our AWS bill. However, we expect to pay more for developer tooling. Our efforts on developing the native mobile app are currently underway, and this costs us each time we build a new release. In 2025 we paid $75 to Expo.dev for these services, and expect this to at least double in 2026. Additionally, we expect to pay for more developer tools for our volunteer developers. One such expense is our new subscription to the Claude for Nonprofits Plan, which we expect will cost us roughly $500 in 2026 (this has significantly increased our speed of development, with almost all major features now involving some use of Claude Code).

We expect 2026 to be a year of significant growth for our community. We have spent much of the end of last year and the start of this year preparing for this growth: by streamlining key features to make the platform more intuitive to use, improving our moderation tools to be able to handle this growth safely, and by improving our tools to understand platform behavior so that we can measure and adapt to changes quickly. As part of this drive for growth, we expect to launch our first paid advertising campaign in 2026, based around our ethos of authentic and non-transactional cultural exchange. This campaign will incur some cost, which we have not fully accounted for yet. We are planning this campaign and our growth in general very carefully, as it is imperative for us to grow the community in a sustainable and healthy manner, attracting the right types of community members.

Finally, we expect revenue to grow steadily in 2026. A significant part of this revenue growth will come from our efforts to carefully grow the community. Additionally, in 2025 we ran our first donation drive, which had stellar results by bringing in over $2000 during the end-of-year drive. This year we plan to conduct a more careful donation drive at the end of the year, and hope to bring in even more than last year's fundraising goal.

We hope this quick analysis helps you understand our financial situation, and in particular, that it may encourage you to donate to support the running costs of Couchers. This analysis was based on exports from our bank account and from Stripe which processes our donations, so some minor discrepancies may exist between rigorous accounting.