A Decade of BookStack

Dan Brown posted on the 12th of July 2025

BookStack is now over 10 years old! The initial commit for the project was made on the 12th of July 2015, and here we are a decade later. A massive thanks to all those who have contributed to the project. Whether that’s via providing code, reporting issues, providing translations, sponsoring, purchasing support, creating content, interacting with the community, or even just mentioning BookStack to others; This all helps drive the project forward and build motivation to keep the platform evolving.

When I started the project I was just building something to suit a need at work, I didn’t envision I’d still be developing this “simple little documentation tool” 10 years down the road for a much bigger audience. I’m so happy that the project has been able to provide value to so many during this time, and I believe there are many things to be proud of in this decade-old open source project.

I look forward to seeing how the project evolves over the next 10 years!

Video with Q&A

As part of this milestone I thought it’d be fun to do a community Q&A session. You can find the Q&A, in addition to discussions for the topics of this blog-post, within the following video:

Financials

Here’s a high-level monthly breakdown of BookStack revenue sources, starting from 2022:

This is just income, so excludes costs, fees, taxes and many other expenses. Older figures may be slightly different to past years’ blogposts due to tweaking how I collate & roll up the numbers, to make reporting a bit easier.

Once again we can see an increase from support services, thanks to a high rate of renewals building upon new sign-ups. Some further enterprise support purchases (£4,500/year) have created additional spikes, especially when within months which had received many other professional support purchases (£450/year) & renewals. The average monthly support revenue has climbed from £1,906 to £2,522 which represents a 32% year-on-year increase.

Income via GitHub sponsors has seen the biggest increase, averaging £1,670 over the last 12 months, up 57% from the previous 12 months at £1,065. This is mostly due to extra company-level sponsorships in addition to a build-up of smaller donations. KoFi donations are up slightly with a 4% increase to a monthly average of £275.

Looking at these numbers, they seem pretty unbelievable. Over the past 12 months, the total revenue pretty much matches what I was earning in my professional lead developer role before I left to focus on open source work, which is just incredible. Once again, a mahoosive thanks to all those that have contributed to this, and therefore provided a stable income for me as I work on BookStack!

Donations Deep Dive

If you’d like to learn more about the donations aspect of the project, I recently put together a video guide about my experiences of donations in open source which might be of interest:

This is intended to be guidance for other open source maintainers, but features BookStack as my core example while diving into visualising all donations across 2024.

Donation Forwarding

In last year’s post I mentioned wanting to expand upon the donations I forward on to other open source services & libraries used to help build BookStack, which was at around £100 per month at that time. Since then I have over doubled this amount to around £225 per month, although this excludes larger one-off donations made where GitHub sponsors is not used.

Going forward I’ll look to scale this up further again, mostly via increasing existing donations as I believe we are now donating to almost all of our dependencies which accept GitHub sponsors, while making larger one-off donations to non-GitHub sponsor based projects.

BookStack, In Numbers

Following our BookStack birthday tradition, we’ll again dive into the numbers to see how BookStack has grown over the past year.

The below figures were collected at the time of writing (10th July 2025), with changes in red/green reflecting change upon last year’s numbers.

GitHub Figures

• 16,926 GitHub stars +2,616
• 2,140 forks on GitHub +330
• 5,704 GitHub issues and PRs opened +598
• 4,047 GitHub issues closed (+378), 653 currently open (+113)
• 207 releases published +17

Code Repository Stats

• 5,079 commits +485
• 186 direct git contributors +11

Social

• 3,895 Discord members +342
• 2,281 Subreddit members +719
• 2,810 YouTube channel subscribers +622
• 55 PeerTube channel followers +11
• 843 Mastodon Followers +287
• 598 Twitter Followers -22

Website Analytics

Main bookstackapp.com site only, Averaged over last 90 days:

• 1,790 unique users per day +373
• 4,064 page views per day +522
• Operating system breakdown:
  • 55% Windows
  • 19% Mac +1%
  • 9% Android
  • 9% Linux
  • 8% iOS/iPadOS

Our full website analytics can be found here.

CrowdIn (Project Translations) Numbers

• 52 languages +6
• 8,679 words to translate +620
• 443 project members +106

Thoughts on the Numbers

Once again I’m surprised to see continued visitor growth on the website, with about a 20% year-on-year increase, since I’ve done little additional marketing. Not something I’ll complain about though! Just confirms that we don’t need to worry that much about extra marketing as natural growth seems to be enough.

Twitter followers are down, which makes sense since I stopped posting updates there from January, with Twitter links being removed from the BookStack site a while before. Our Mastodon follower count has continued to climb though, growing far above what we ever had on Twitter. It’s nice to see that we can have more success on a friendlier, open, decentralised, albeit more niche, platform.

The rate of project releases has slowed in comparison to last year, but there’s also been more commits, reflecting a slower release cycle but with just as much development effort, if not more, put into them overall.

Further Reading

Here are the non-release/update posts that you may have missed over the last year:

• Nine Years of BookStack
• BookStack Project Update for September 2024
• BookStack in 2024
• Testing Better Dependency Management
• Using BookStack as a Linux File System
• Things I’m Proud of in the BookStack Project

Header Image Credits:  Photo by Bernard DUPONT (CC-BY-SA-2) - Image Modified