An update on our funding

It has been a while since our last general blog post. Normally, I’m deep in technical projects like FreeSocks and PacketFrame, and maintaining our infrastructure. However, I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, and I’d like to update everyone on what’s happening at Unredacted and our funding situation.

Since becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2024, we’ve very much accelerated in many ways - and I’m eternally grateful for it. In 2025, we received a grant from Power Up Privacy. They were/are an organization that funds organizations that work on privacy-preserving tech like we do. That grant allowed us to purchase a large amount of hardware, pay for development and maintenance time, and pay the bills that run services like our Tor exit relays, FreeSocks, XMPP.is and our Matrix homeserver. All on our own network, running in 2 datacenters.

Across all of our services, we’ve reached over 100,000 people across the world. We’re also on track to push 40-50+ petabytes of traffic per year. Our impact is only continuing to grow.

It costs a lot of money to operate, and we’ve spent the equivalent of a brand new car on hardware and infrastructure in 2025 alone. The cost of hardware and services has risen dramatically, and we want to be in a situation where we can continue to expand our services and reach in a sustainable manner. Our mission to create a more accessible and free Internet has never been stronger.

Power Up Privacy made most of this possible, alongside other smaller grants, and our very generous donors.

In 2026 so far, we’ve happily raised over $45,000 in funding from the Tor Internet Freedom Fundraiser, and Octant’s Epoch 13. We’re eternally grateful for this, and I want to thank everyone who contributed to those fundraisers.

However, our plans grow larger. We were expecting multi-year funding from Power Up Privacy. However, unfortunately, they seemingly disappeared in late 2025. Their domain name has recently expired too, and we haven’t been able to reach them for close to a year now, alongside other like-minded organizations who relied on their funding.

We don’t know what happened to them - but hope that everything is ok.

This creates a precarious situation for our future though, and we’ve been focusing much of our time on grant writing in hopes that we can achieve further funding to continue our work at the current pace. While there are a few wonderful opportunities that we are pursuing, everything is uncertain, and we’ve cut back on our plans for the NoiseNet project.

We’re asking for our community’s help because of this situation, and we’d be happy to speak with anyone about the following:

• If you know of any funders or grant opportunities that you believe we should pursue
• If you yourself are able to make a sizable, and tax-deductible contribution
• If you love what we do and would like to make a smaller contribution at unredacted.org/donate

We’re up against a lot; authoritarian governments who wish to censor the Internet, jail journalists, and even average people for their beliefs. These governments are powerful, and have a lot more money and resources than we do. Still, with our small size and budget, we’ve been able to punch a hole in their censorship systems and provide a corner of the Internet that remains free.

I believe we’re an extremely effective, fast and dedicated organization in many regards. No fluff. We build what we say we’ll build, we build it fast and take our work seriously in all aspects. For many years, I’ve even funded every project out of pocket. We’re only in this because we strongly believe in our mission, and that won’t stop.

Thank you for your support over the years!

Zach

Executive Director
Unredacted Inc