newsletter:2025 Winter edition

Welcome to the 2025 Winter edition of the FreeSewing newsletter.

Here's what we've cobbled together on this first day of the year:

• 🎉 Happy New Year (1-minute read by Joost)
• 🏆 How did we do in 2024? (2-minute read by Joost)
• ✅ What are we doing in 2025? (2-minute read by Joost)

Let's begin.

 

 

 

 

🎉 Happy New Year

I would like to start by wishing you a happy New Year. 2025 is officially here, and it's kind of an exciting year as far as numbers go. For one thing, 2025 is 45 squared (45²), which is rare as far as years go, as 44² happened way back in 1936, and 46² won't be here until 2116.

But there's more, because 2025 is also the sum of the cube of all single digits (1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³), and it also happens to be a Harshad number.

Wikipedia tells me that:

harshad comes from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver

So, my optimistic interpretation is that 2025 announces itself as a year that is supposed to bring joy.

My only wish is that the numbers don't lie and that indeed this year will bring you lots of joy.

🏆 How did we do in 2024?

FreeSewing passed a non-trivial milestone in 2024, when we passed the 100k activated user accounts on FreeSewing.org. As I'm writing this, our website has 106.734 activated user accounts. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, the growth of the site has caused issues big and small as we needed to scale up and sometimes adapt the way things are handled behind the scenes to deal with the sheer numbers. We've got a good handle on things, and I expect we'll be culling older/dormant accounts throughout the year, so this is not something that has me worried.

2024 was also the first (full) year since we switched to a pay-what-you-want model. Revenue for the year clocked in at €10.386,63 ($10.808), which is slight increase over the year before (1.6% increase over 2023's €10.222,07).

I am happy about that number, but it's also a source of worry because the ever increasing number of users does not translate in any sort of meaningful way to more financial support. In other words, an increasingly smaller percentage of our users are the ones who make it all possible, and that concerns not only because it's a small minority but also because my feeling is that this group skews heavily to users who have been with us for longer.

In other words, I do have some concerns for the longer term future. But I prefer to focus on the positive and more than 10k going to those who need it most is certainly reason to be thankful.

✅ What are we doing in 2025?

Version 4 of FreeSewing, that's what we're doing. Yes, the next major release is on its way, although it needs more time in the over before it's really to be consumed. (If you're curious, you can keep an eye on this pull request).

The instigator for the new major release is that we'll drop support for NodeJS 18, and expect at least version 20 going forward. We use the so-called LTS release (long term support) which is recommended for production deployments. The end-of-life date for version 18 is the end of April of this year, so by that time we will move to v4 and NodeJS 20, which necessitates a major version bump.

We are of course using the opportunity to make some other (breaking) changes, although those changes will be minimal in our core library and designs.

The majority of the changes will be in how we manage all the other stuff. From the very start, we've focused on making it easy for contributors to create and add their own designs, and that's proven very successful. FreeSewing's collection of designs has grown not only in absolute numbers, but also in the amount of different people who have contributed them.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the other things that keep FreeSewing ticking. Like the various websites, and backend code, and all the many things big and small that make FreeSewing what it is. We have great contributors who are eager to help out, but historically the focus has always been on providing tools, documentation, guidance, and handrails to create designs. When it comes to working on the website or backend code, documentation is often lacking, and it's just a lot harder to get involved with that aspect of the project.

That is of course entirely my fault. For all the work that went into making it easy for people to contribute designs, no similar effort was undertaken for the other aspects of the project.

So, that will be my personal focus in 2025, and the upcoming v4 release will be a big part of that.

Take care of yourself.

joost