This budget proposal is a follow up to the Gitcoin & Grants Lab 2025 Strategy, posted last month: Gitcoin 2025 Planning Recap
This budget proposal covers the full year of 2025. The budget requested is $4,831,109 with anticipated revenues of $2,323,027. We will also request $401,221 for reserves (calculating total reserves at 20% with current treasury of $565,000.)
But first – a quick 2024 recap!
We’ve tracked our 2024 progress in the following posts:
- 2025 strategy: Gitcoin 2025 Planning Recap
- December recap: Gitcoin Monthly Team Meeting - December 2024
- November recap: Grants Lab Monthly Meeting - November 2024
- October recap: Grants Lab Monthly Meeting - October 2024
- September recap: Grants Lab Monthly Meeting - September 2024
- July recap: Grants Lab Monthly Meeting - July 2024
Our org-wide goal for 2024 was to achieve $15M in GMV. We fell short of this with $10,688,999 achieved. We started the year very slowly, partially due to a large Allo v2 migration, and picked up our pace in H2. Extrapolating H2 performance through the rest of the year would have led to achievement of the goal – which gives us some confidence that we are on the right track. We are fired up to achieve our 2025 goal of $30M GMV.
In addition to GMV, we tracked the following goals,
Q3 (full details here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.)
- Double GMV w Whale Hunting
- We have since substantially changed our BD resourcing and have a pipeline and recent commits that we are excited about, with roughly $2M in GMV committed in January to date.
- Position our technology stack for our future
- We created requirements that have set a solid foundation that the team is now operating on top of. In retrospect the KPIs set for this were too ambitious.
- Roll out refreshed brand narrative + positioning
- More limited capacity than anticipated constrained our progress – we carried some of this forward into Q4. We are excited about our social presence and sales support and ramping up our content engine.
Q4: (full details here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.)
- Establish Gitcoin as THE leader in grants – through our products (incl GG!), services, and content.
- We acknowledged that this is a multi-quarter effort but wanted to put particular focus on it in Q4 to make sure that it was the primary focus across the org. Some key points that we established for this effort are shipping impactful product updates, delivering monthly high-quality content, and hitting quality builder metrics in GG. We started strong with product updates but did not ship anything meaningful in December. We are still getting the content machine running. We did hit all of the quality builder metrics for GG!
- Capture value for our products and services
- Our KPIs for this were that 80% of rounds 100k+ are revenue generating (achieved) and to sign two Pro-tier customers ($500k+, achieved) and one Premium-tier ($1m+) customer. With 3 of 4 KPIs hit we have called this achieved though are eager to close a Premium tier in Jan.
- Develop 2025 product strategy
- Delivered with 2025 planning, which you can view here: Gitcoin 2025 Planning Recap
2025 Costs
Headcount:
Headcount remains the largest cost at Grants Lab, though we do not anticipate increasing this cost YoY. We will lower this cost vs H2 2024 as some individuals join the Allo team. We only have three anticipated new hires, a Principal Data Analyst, Grant Ops Manager and a BD Lead – all of these are backfills of current roles and budgeted for Jan. We do not expect to continue expanding the team or resources significantly. We have everything we need to succeed – it’s time to go get it!
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headcount | $783,504.84 | $783,504.84 | $783,504.84 | $783,504.84 | $3,134,019.36 |
Consultants:
This line item has decreased slightly from 2024, when we averaged $100k/month in Q4. We anticipate smaller costs associated with Wonderland as much of the surface area they work on (protocol / dev tools) will now be in the Allo organization. We remain really excited about the quality of talent that they bring to our team! We have added a small monthly PR cost ($7,500/mo) for 2025 as we look to leverage this channel for awareness and brand-building.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other Consultants | $211,000.00 | $171,000.00 | $171,000.00 | $171,000.00 | $724,000.00 |
Software:
This line item remains flat vs 2025. Our most significant line items are related to data indexer hosting (roughly $4k/mo) with the rest distributed across different software subscriptions.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software & Subscriptions | $42,087.00 | $42,087.00 | $42,087.00 | $42,087.00 | $168,348.00 |
Travel:
We have decreased this to a flat $2k/mo as we will be managing travel expenses for major conferences through org-wide GCPs. This was previously $4.8k/mo in H2 2024.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Travel, Lodging and Meals | $6,000.00 | $6,000.00 | $6,000.00 | $6,000.00 | $24,000.00 |
Miscellaneous:
The biggest line item in the miscellaneous bucket is audits – we have $5k/mo budgeted for audits. The remaining items are coaching costs for staff members as well as gas subsidization for QA and testing.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miscellaneous | $22,500.00 | $22,500.00 | $22,500.00 | $22,500.00 | $90,000.00 |
2025 Revenue
2024 was the first year that Gitcoin produced significant revenue. We earned roughly $700k in revenue in 2024. Half of that ($321k) was earned through services, which we only started formally pricing in Q4. Additionally, we earned 204k OP in Optimism grants, and 36k OP in retrofunding (which is attributed to the full Gitcoin org, not just Grants Lab). Finally, we brought in 14 ETH from the product attestations experiment in GG21.
In 2025, we have a big focus on revenue and covering 50% of our costs with revenue. We will primarily focus on ramping up services revenue this year, as well as continuing our current grants work and a smaller ramp in product experiments and product revenue.
Services
Services revenue represents an approximate 6.5% take rate relative to our GMV goal ($25M). This is in line with our experience and research for what the market of large grants programs are willing to pay. Roughly $500k of this revenue is forecasted to come from existing customers, with the remaining $1.1M coming from new clients.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Services | $169,583.33 | $364,375.00 | $499,166.67 | $593,958.33 | $1,627,083.33 |
Grants
We’re not looking to grow grants revenue YoY or as a substantial long-term revenue stream. We want to build up our product and service offerings long-term, but there are a few customers (especially Optimism) that prefer working with us on a grants basis and for those select customers we are happy to work within that.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grants | $125,000.00 | $125,000.00 | $50,000.00 | $50,000.00 | $350,000.00 |
Product Experiments
Product experiments are a bit of a wild card for 2025. We did very limited experimentation with product revenue in 2024 (GG22 attestations) and think there are a lot of creative opportunities to continue leveraging attestations, particularly for GG rounds. We also believe there are other product experiments outside of attestations that we may launch and collect revenue through.
| Q1 2025 | Q2 2025 | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product Experiments / Attestation | $78,734.04 | $83,571.44 | $88,892.59 | $94,745.85 | $345,943.92 |
Current Treasury
The current treasury can be found at 0xd1f5d2A59Ef194aE00F27b2DA6599ce207ddE7cB and is summarized below.
Conclusion
Feedback is welcomed on this budget request as well as the strategy post!
