I am doing a joint thread this year, as while I was working on both I realized there were a few linked topics that made it easier to write as one piece.
I’ll give the tldr now though, so you don’t have to search for it in the middle of my rambling – the raise will be 6%.
How did the year go?
Last year, for the thread about yearly raises, I wrote:
I’m glad we did this, because not only it was really nice to see each other in South Africa (and get raises ;p), but we also did manage to get several new good clients and extended several contracts significantly over the year. We are not to the level of growth we had some of the early years of OpenCraft, or during the pandemic - but that level of growth was quite strenuous, though it might actually be a good thing.
The gentler growth pace is to thank, but also @tikr 's skillful and gentle capacity and sustainability management - kudos!
And while a lot of the sustainability goals for 2024 were linked to getting enough contracts, it was equally crucial to ensure sustainability numbers in the different cells would be improved. And they have been! We are still reviewing the final numbers for 2024 for the different cells, but the sustainability numbers have been getting a lot better over the past year. And that can only happen when many of us are careful about it - so thank you for that.
Outlook for 2025
While 2024 went pretty well, we will still need to be careful for 2025. We do still heavily depend on the contracts with a small group of large clients for our financial health. The good side is that those clients tend to be the ones with whom we have the strongest match - they are overwhelmingly the clients we like to work for the most, and they seem to appreciate the way we work in return!
But sometimes budgets change on the client side regardless, and currently losing any of them without a replacement would quickly erase years of growth, and put sustainability in the red… Which is not a super comfortable situation to be in, even when all is going well. Especially since two of those large clients have shown signs of decreasing commitments for 2025.
Market positioning
We have known about this situation, the dependence on a few large clients, for a while - long gone are the times where we would be able to win many smaller clients, or with smaller budgets. The competition on the cheaper end of the Open edX providers market has long established itself, and we rarely even try to compete for the smaller jobs anymore. Those prospects just compare hourly cost numbers, and don’t really take into account the additional expertise and quality we bring in.
We do know from our larger clients that we still have a pretty good edge in that domain, though! Especially when the developments are larger or more complex, or when taking into account the cost of maintaining the work on the long term, we are still the cheapest. And I would dare to say – by far.
There is some competition for this higher end too, but it will be hard for other providers to catch-up imho. For a simple reason: the other providers being profiled to compete on lower costs, they often can’t afford to pay the average international rate to their staff. So to get top-class developers, they are stuck either recruiting from a local pool who doesn’t know their value on the international market, or hiring those as a small subset of their team. But then the majority of the hours affected to projects can’t come from just their A-team, or they would have to raise their prices… I’m guessing some might eventually decide to raise their prices to solve the conundrum, so we can’t rest on our laurels either, but it’s hard to change a team and a business approach mid-flight.
So what about the raises? 
Given the good year, and despite the inevitable risks and challenges ahead, it seems completely justified to give a good raise to the team. As mentioned above, 6% seems to be a good number for now. It’s not the 10% increases from the early years where we had huge growth, but it’s still almost the double of the 3.5% raise companies are doing on average for 2025. 2-3% is also where global inflation seems to be stabilizing at, so that would also be the double of that. (Note that, if you joined during the year, the raise would apply as a proportion of the time you joined during the year - if you joined on July 1st, you would get half of the raise.)
That said, to be able to sustain the increase expense this generates, not just this year but all years to come, we will have to be careful with this going forward. The slow down in our growth rate and the narrowing of our clients profile shows that we are getting close to a ceiling for what we can charge clients, and we haven’t increased the client rates proportionally to the team’s rates lately. Some of this makes sense as we mature as a company and a team, otherwise the rates we charge clients would explode exponentially. We do have a bit of margin left between the two, so we should still be able to maintain those rates and keep raising the team rates for some time even if we can’t raise client prices – but this would be at the cost of building reserves for tougher times more slowly, or having to dig in them, so we will have to be careful.
That said, for now we can enjoy the win - and we never know what the future reserves anyway, so we will have to get there to figure it out.
Open edX Project & Community Health
One reason to be quite optimistic about where that future will go is the continued evolution and transformation of the Open edX project and its community over the past years - and which imho has picked up further in recent months.
The original trigger, as with many of those evolutions, has been the changes at edX.org & 2U. While many of the previous changes were good for 2U, it hasn’t been a good year at all for them, with the stock tanking and a lot of people getting laid off.
This should make it a bad news for the project - and it is, as it endangers edx.org, its use by many institutions and learners, and diminishes the number of contributions 2U can make to the project. But the way the rest of the project and community reacted is a profound cause for optimism. 2U’s withdrawal from a lot of the core maintenance has prompted Axim and many of the providers and community members to step up their maintenance contributions. There is still a gap, but that looks like it is on its way to getting filled up by providers discussing how to raise and equalize their core and maintenance contributions - and this, done in an open & bottom-up way that was unimaginable just a few years ago. There have also been many improvements to the core contributor program being discussed and approved within the community via the Core Contibutor Summit.
A lot of kudos on this actually goes to Axim, that has taken the torch of governing the project from 2U pretty effectively - and many of the benefits we were hoping would come from separating the concerns of edx.org and Open edX have come to fruition. And unlike many open source projects over the past few years, 2U has been very graceful and responsible in the way they have passed on that torch, without any of the fork-inducing drama less responsible open source leaders have generated.
So, like other topics before, not everything is rosy and we will have to keep working on it within the community - but there are lots of reason to expect a lot of good things to come, in the coming years, from the maturation of the project and its governance. This should help ensure that the project follows more closely the needs of its community and users, regardless to what happens to any individual project member. This is not an easy feat!
OpenCraft-specific Topics
Our involvement in Open edX and improving it for our clients will remain our #1 priority for the forseable future, but we will be continuing many of the additional initatives that we have started putting in place over the past years.
This doesn’t make for an exciting new announcement for the “State of OpenCraft” but I think that’s a feature rather than a bug. Many companies change directions or set radical new goals every year, but that is often a reflection of short-termism. Before any of the goals can be attained, a new goal is set, and the whole thing often ends up either in a series of destructive dramas (like the over-hiring drive from years ago, followed with massive layoffs a year or two later), or empty bullshit that doesn’t actually change anything.
Listaflow
One of those goals, set many years ago but still never attained, has been to try to produce our own open source project, and use it to diversify the risk of market fluctuations for the company.
This is easier said than done, though. We tried it with Ocim at first, and more recently with Listaflow. As we expected, this would be a long term effort. We are still far from making it a successful popular project, and we haven’t really started marketing it - but we are definitely dogfooding it, and its use within the Open edX community helps making sure it is not just working for us, but for others too.
The next step will be to open its doors to other users, and starting to market it! (@Fox @cassie would you like to give an update on the plan for this year for Listaflow?). The marketing plan & budget are still being worked on, but we will want to make sure we put a decent amount of budget behind the project development and its marketing, to give it a fair chance.
Switch from Jira
This is another project that might take some of our bandwidth in the coming year, as our aging and unmaintained hosted Jira needs to be replaced. It might look like “just” a tool change, but the issue tracker is so central to so many of our processes and habits, and its interconnection with the rest of our other tools so strong, it will inevitably be a little disruptive, and require to change some of our ways and habits.
Thankfully, @kshitij has already done a pretty good discovery, and while most of the actual work is ahead of us, it does look like we might have a chance of ending up in a better place than we started. It would be really nice if we can actually end up replacing almost 1-to-1 the functionalities we need from Jira (which is a painful piece of software, but is also incredibly full-featured) with an open source project we are a contributor of. If we managed that, I would expect plenty of long term benefits - which, like always with open source, are difficult to predict precisely upfront! After all, originally while starting with Open edX, there was even less of a business case for contributing to it.
That’s all folks
And with that, that’s enough rambling for today! If you have any comment or question, don’t hesitate. And if there is any topic you wished I had covered in here (but likely forgot about
), please say so and we can chat about it in this thread.
Happy 2025 everyone
NB: See the previous State of OpenCraft from 2023 too, if you are curious. Some of this still applies!