newsletter:2026 Winter edition

Welcome to the 2026 Winter edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we have put together for you on this 1st of January:

• 🥹 2025 was one hell of a year (4-minute read by Joost)
• 📣 FreeSewing at FOSDEM 2026 (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🚨 On inequality and optimism (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's go.

 

 

🥹 2025 was one hell of a year

The year 2025 has been something. Not merely for the world in general, but also for FreeSewing specifically. Two things have made this year particularly challenging for us:

• The new US administration
• Our growth rate

The first point has kept us very busy in the first half of the year. Pretty much as soon as it became clear the incoming US administration was going after minorities with wanton cruelty, we started working on a plan to shield our users' data from the US government.
Given that US-based tech companies not only have a legal obligation to hand over user data, but are an active and willing participant in all this, that meant moving our entire tech stack away from big tech.

This took a lot of work, but we did it. Everything is hosted in Europe now, we migrated FreeSewing.org to FreeSewing.eu, from AWS to Scaleway, from Github to Codeberg, and so on. Throughout all this, we strived to ensure that these changes were transparent for users, and we succeeded in doing so.

By the time summer rolled in, everything user-facing was taken care of. However, we still have a backlog of other issues to deal with that are a direct result of this somewhat forced migration. Things like CI (which stands for Continuous Integration -- a way to automate testing of changes to the codebase and new releases) and other automations haven't fully been restored to the pre-migration levels because they typically involve provider-specific tools and APIs, which means migrating as-is is not possible, but requires more work and planning.

We probably would have taken care of it by now, if it wasn't for the second item on our list of challenges this year: our growth rate.

Last year, in this very New Year's edition of our newsletter, we celebrated an important milestone as we had passed the 100.000 users mark. Exactly one year ago, I wrote:

As I'm writing this, our website has 106.734 activated user accounts. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, the growth of the site has caused issues big and small as we needed to scale up and sometimes adapt the way things are handled behind the scenes to deal with the sheer numbers.

Today, that number stands at 335.509 activated user accounts.

In other words, in the previous 12 months, more than twice as many users have signed up for a FreeSewing account than in our entire history preceding 2025 combined. We had 106.734 users, then 228.775 more users joined.
In September alone -- fueled by social media buzz -- we onboarded more than 50.000 people. The bandwidth required for hosting the website passed 8 terabyte that month alone, and that doesn't even include the images.

Are those big numbers? You tell me. Certainly not for the Googles or Facebooks of this world. But for FreeSewing? It's been brutal. And it's not merely a matter of technical challenges, there's a financial aspect too. This year was the first time that I struggled to pay FreeSewing's bills.

It is cause for concern for me not so much because of the acute situation at hand -- as I mentioned, growth is not uniform but rather has big peaks, which translates to our bills also having big peaks -- but rather the way things are trending.

You see, FreeSewing's revenue for 2025 was €10.202,97 which is slightly lower than 2024 (€10.386,63), despite a 3-fold increase in users. It's also marginally less revenue than 2023 (€10.222,07), even though we now have 6 times the amount of users we had in 2023.

So, this is starting to look like a tragedy of the commons. Ever more people discover FreeSewing, but the proportion of people who are willing to support us financially gets increasingly smaller while our costs get increasingly higher. Revenue seems to have plateaued just above the 10K mark, and further growth does somehow not pay any dividends.

I am not certain what to do about this. I know that I can ask you for (more) money, and that doing so will most likely have a positive effect. But that's short-term relief, and not a long-term sustainable solution.

Are we doing it wrong?
Is 10K some sort of glass ceiling?
Is it the economy?

I don't know. I guess you don't know either. But if you have an idea how we can prevent FreeSewing from becoming financially unsustainable, please do tell me about it. You can just hit Reply.

In any case, while I do want to be open and honest about my concerns about the direction things seem to be heading, that does not take away from the fact that we were able to donate €10.202,97 to Médecins Sans Frontières this year.

That is obviously a good thing. A great thing even. Truly magical, and I will reach out to all of you who have contributed to this awesome bit of good news in the coming days.

Regardless of whether you supported us this way or not in 2025. I wish you a happy New Year, and nothing but the very best for 2026.

Stay strong.

 

 

📣 FreeSewing at FOSDEM 2026

Held every year in Brussels, FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting ) is a conference entirely dedicated to free and open source software. It's also a non-commercial event run by volunteers, so it has nothing to do with your run-of-the-mill tech conference, it's really something special.

This year's edition will be held on 31 January & 1 February, and feature keynotes, lightning talks, 65 different devrooms that dive deeper in specific topics, as well as the so-called main track of talks selected by the FOSDEM program committee.

It is on that main track, specifically on Sunday 1 February at 13:00 that you'll see this talk on the schedule: FreeSewing: How to buy less, create more, and feel great about it.

I (joost) will be giving this talk myself, and if I'm being honest, I'm low-key terrified about the whole idea.

So if you're around, come and say hi. It would certainly help me feel at ease.

 

 

🚨 On inequality and optimism

The world is not in a good place right now. There's a lot of stuff coming at us and it seems invariably rather messed up. If I had to pick one thing in an attempt to distill this feeling of unease, it would be the increasing inequality.

A vanishingly small minority of people are appropriating resources and wealth at a rate that would put the greed of Smaug to shame. Furthermore, the amount of pain and suffering that they are willing to inflict on others to trade it all in for just a little more makes for some truly evil outcomes.

We all have our own stuff going on. We live in different places, under different leadership (or lack thereof), with different cultures. I don't know what you're dealing with, or what keeps you up at night. Perhaps I have an idea, or maybe I'm way off.

But I think we can all relate to inequality. It doesn't take a genius to see that if we let this play out, we'll end up in a dystopian future with a small elite who have everything, and the vast majority left to fend for themselves in the water wars or whatever.

There's a reason Luigi is so popular. Or that I see ever more pictures of guillotines in my feed. But I doubt that a violent correction will accomplish lasting change.

I'd like to remain optimistic that we can still fix this, and somehow -- together -- find a better way where we can all share the pursuit of happiness. If anything, I feel it is non-optional to remain optimistic. Because if we hang our heads, those bastards are going to walk right over us and turn this planet into a hellscape.

Let's not let them.

Take care of yourself. And if you can, please take care of others too.

Love,
joost