2024 was an unexpectedly eventful year for us. Without warning, our main source of funding was withdrawn. However, this was followed by immense support, which touched us deeply and led to the decision to continue. The many donations in particular enabled us to cushion the difficult times. The many new members, who almost doubled our membership count, gave us hope that we could continue without advertising revenue. We thought to ourselves: this transformation could ultimately make us more independent. Because then both we and our users would be free from advertising and we could focus all the more on better web search. We would have more time for features and improvements that we have been wanting for years.
The first month of 2025 has now passed and one may ask how things are going with the SUMA-EV. The truth is that we still can't be sure whether it will be enough in the end. However, a lot has happened since the last announcement, so we can finally announce it: Thanks in particular to the many donations at the end of 2024, we have enough money in our account to keep going for the next six months, guaranteed. And if we can maintain our current number of members, this will also be enough for the rest of the year. During this time, we will continue to try to recruit new members and attract more people to our ad-free search. By giving up our office in Hanover and switching to 100% home office as well as making savings on our own salaries, we have been able to stabilise ourselves and have a good prospect of improvement. If membership growth continues, we hope to be on a stable footing by the beginning of 2026. User-financed and without dependence on any large advertising networks.
We apologise that we are still unable to publish precise figures on our situation in this update. Unfortunately, there are two reasons for this: Firstly, we are still closely monitoring the situation ourselves. We intend to present all the figures with cent-by-cent accuracy at our Annual General Meeting, probably in summer, and until then we will regularly publish small status reports as the figures become more precise. The other reason is that we are currently still considering legal steps to take against the sudden loss of our previous funding basis (which we consider to be in breach of contract). We therefore unfortunately have to remain somewhat vague.
So what do we hope to achieve in 2025 and what are our plans? As already mentioned in the previous text, new memberships will be our main goal. This does not mean that donations and other income will not help us. On the contrary: by revitalising the SUMA-Lab, we want to create more opportunities to influence our projects through donations (as well as through collaboration). But memberships should be the basis so that we can continue to run projects like MetaGer in the future.
Based on this goal, we have considered how many members we need to achieve this. Our goal for this year is to reach 400 new members. That sounded like a lot to us at first, given that it's around 33 per month. Fortunately, we already reached this monthly number in January, so we are confident that we can achieve it this year. We are planning a number of campaigns and activities to achieve this. In the following year, depending on donations and income, we hope to have another 100-200 members so that we can continue to exist in the long term and dedicate ourselves to the projects that are important to us. Speaking of projects: In addition to the aforementioned SUMA-Lab, the planned new autocomplete and other projects, the OpenWebIndex will finally go live this year. We are delighted that this long-term SUMA-EV project is finally within reach. With this new web index, we hope not only to make web search less dependent on large corporations, but also to be able to offer a public search for everyone again. This hope is the motivation for our goal of 400 members. We would therefore like to ask everyone to consider becoming a member. Every member helps us to keep going. (We are aware that our membership is currently only available in German language. We do aim to make it more accessible in the future but have to solve some legal enigmas first.)
And that is how I would like to end this article. By saying that the whole team is hopeful and that we can rightly claim that the worst is behind us. We couldn't have done it without you. Whether you are a member, a donor or someone who has simply recommended us to others. Here's to 400 new members in 2025, an open web index and a better web for everyone.
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