HACKER Q&A
📣 samemail88

Are there any successful tech non-profits?


I'm curious if there are any technology based non-profits that are cater to direct consumers where their primary business is a website/web business. The biggest one I can think of is Wikipedia; they are successful and have a very popular set of websites. Mozilla is another successful non-profit, but its primary business is not a website but a web application (Firefox). I'm not sure if Patreon is a non-profit or community benefit corporation. Do you know any others?


  👤 softwaredoug Accepted Answer ✓
The Internet Archive http://archive.org

Signal - http://signal.org


👤 sarthakjshetty
Arguably one of the most profitable non-profits of all time: Stanford Research Institute, with a revune of $540 million (2014 figure)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International


👤 dmlittle

👤 mtmail
If wikipedia counts, then openstreetmap is similar.

👤 tiffanyh
Ghost (~$5M annual revenue).

https://ghost.org/about/


👤 sonofacorner
Not sure if Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/) qualifies to the type of non-profit you're asking about.

But they've built an amazing resource to learn more about the world.


👤 scripta
https://free.law/

Among its other achievements, the Freelaw Project was instrumental in the push for recent bi-partisan legislation, signed by Pres. Biden, in the realm of ethics reform for the judicial branch.


👤 MacsHeadroom
Here's a list of 600+ of the largest tech non-profits https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/

Some of my favorites which haven't been mentioned yet:

f-droid.org

calyxinstitute.org

torproject.org


👤 20after4
I'm not sure Mozilla counts as they are a for-profit corp owned by a non-profit. But AFAIK the majority of their activity falls under the for-profit corporation.

👤 pirate787
This isn't totally consumer but its successful tech

https://skytruth.org/


👤 guywithahat
Patreon is for-profit as far as I can tell, givesendgo.com is a nonprofit though