FreeCAD News

The FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion col­lects cor­po­rate and per­son­al dona­tions and dis­trib­utes the funds to con­trib­u­tors who improve FreeCAD and its ecosystem.

In 2025, we are switch­ing to quar­ter­ly waves of grant appli­ca­tion reviews. Here are the sub­mis­sion deadlines:

• Q1: March 1
• Q2: June 1
• Q3: Sept 1
• Q4: Nov 15

If you want to apply for a grant for the next round of reviews, please sub­mit your appli­ca­tion before March 1. Oth­er­wise, your sub­mis­sion will be reviewed in the next wave.

For 2025, we ear­marked $20,000 for each quar­ter­ly wave (a total of $80,000). Since we now com­mon­ly receive appli­ca­tions request­ing $5,000 to $8,000 per project, we expect some com­pe­ti­tion between con­tenders. Please fol­low the guide­lines when sub­mit­ting your application.

While we don’t have a fixed list of project ideas, we gen­er­al­ly favor appli­ca­tions that address major issues pre­vent­ing FreeCAD from gain­ing wider adop­tion. Expect high­er pri­or­i­ty giv­en to projects that aim to improve UX/UI or per­for­mance, intro­duce miss­ing func­tion­al­i­ty, and improve exist­ing design fea­tures (such as fillets).

We also have a sep­a­rate Ond­sel Onward fund of $40,000 for devel­op­ers inter­est­ed in mak­ing any code devel­oped by Ond­sel to become more use­ful for the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty. This fund comes from a pri­vate sponsor.

If you are inter­est­ed, please read the devel­op­ment fund page and apply.