Happy New Year to anyone I haven’t had a chance to say it yet!
And with the new year, comes a new round of raises evaluation for the team. You can refer to last year’s post for some background about where OpenCraft currently stands. And to save you from having to look at the end of this post first:
The raise for 2025 will be 5%.
A good news is that sustainability has been well stabilized, thanks to both the budgeting efforts and the signup of new clients and projects. Thanks to everyone who helps with those efforts, as this is what ensures we remain sustainable and remain there for the long term! And special kudos to @tikr@jordan@pooja@Ali@cassie@Fox in particular for your work there, but everyone is playing an important role here.
The ratio of billed vs unbilled look good now, and the number of prospects in the pipe helps growing the overall amount of billable hours (and thus of unbillable too, at constant sustainability rate). However, there is one aspect which keeps not growing back as much as much as it used to, or that we could hope given the projects in the prospect pipe: the overall amount of billable work. We have been able to mostly maintain it, but not really regrow yet.
There are plenty of upcoming good leads, so once more it looks set to be something we should be able to correct in the coming year. But since this has already been wrong several times, and that we keep seeing cost being a factor in losing a part of those leads, it’s best to be prudent. Which is why for the 2025 raise I picked 5% - it’s slightly above the worldwide inflation rate for 2025 estimated at 4 to 4.2%, but not much more, as we will likely have to keep pausing raising our client rates, until the work pipeline fills up. Hopefully it’s still a nice raise to see in the upcoming monthly invoices
This is great news! I’m glad that everyone’s hard work allows us to afford another raise this year. And +1 to what has been said about the transparency of the process!
Great news, and thank you @antoviaque ! We had few close starts on some larger projects in 2025 that didn’t end up moving forward. With that said, I am very optimistic about this year and motivated to make it a great one. Pooja and I are in a nice rhythm now, and coupled with the pipeline we’ve built and the (many) lessons learnt, I’m excited for the year ahead
You can refer to last year’s post for some background about where OpenCraft currently stands. And to save you from having to look at the end of this post first: 
