FreeCAD News

Let’s talk about the 2025 FPA grant pro­gram: what projects were vot­ed for, what projects weren’t, and what we think needs to change for this year’s program.

2025 grants

Last year, we got 46 grant appli­ca­tions. We vot­ed ‘yes’ on 31 of them and ‘no’ on 15. Here is a quick explainer:

• Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 are quar­ters of the year
• declined: grant appli­ca­tions that weren’t vot­ed for
• OO: grant appli­ca­tions for the sep­a­rate Ond­sel Onwards fund

#	Grant Title	Sub­mit­ter	Labels	Bud­get
23	Refac­tor­ing Sketch­er 2	AjinkyaDa­hale	Q1	4000 EUR
24	Improve FreeCAD Copy Paste system.	Pad­dle­Stroke	declined	4000 EUR
25	Tech­Draw: New Page	Pad­dle­Stroke	declined	4000 EUR
26	Tech­Draw: rework anno­ta­tion tools	Pad­dle­Stroke	declined	6000 EUR
27	FreeCAD Road Workbench	HakanSeven12	declined	10000 EUR
28	home­brew-freecad fix build­ing a mac app bun­dle using deps based around homebrew	ipatch	Q1	1000 EUR
29	[Lens] Make Lens Plat­form Self-Deploy­able and Cloud-Agnostic	amrit3701	Q1, OO	6500 USD
31	Con­cept for ISO GPS imple­men­ta­tion “3D Anno­ta­tion and Tol­er­anc­ing WB”	maxwxyz	declined	9000 EUR
32	Reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the FreeCAD UI — WBs and tools	Fran­cis­co-Rosa	declined	7000 USD
33	New curves for Sketcher	AjinkyaDa­hale	Q1	6000 EUR
34	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the FEM workbench	marioalexis84	Q1	3000 EUR
35	Mod­ern­iz­ing FreeCAD’s Ren­der­ing and Selec­tion Systems	tri­tao	Q1	4000 EUR
36	Mul­ti­thread­ing Archi­tec­ture Improve­ments in FreeCAD	tri­tao	Q1	2000 EUR
38	Pat­tern tools refac­tor, uni­fi­ca­tion and addi­tion­al functionality.	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q2	2000 EUR
39	Con­fig­u­ra­tion Space Visu­al­iza­tion for Com­put­er-Aid­ed Geo­met­ric Design	behol­lis­ter	Q2	500 USD
40	Web­sites improve­ments ini­tia­tive — Step 1	mar­cus­pol­lio	Q2	4000 EUR
41	Part­De­sign: Extrude Two directions	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q2	500 EUR
42	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Assem­bly workbench	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q2	3000 EUR
43	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Sketch­er workbench	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q2	3000 EUR
44	CAM/BIM: 2D Nest­ing Tool for FreeCAD	Abhi­ram­Mas­na	Q2	150000 INR
45	Research ISO GPS / GD&T for an over­all con­cept as imple­men­ta­tion in FreeCAD	maxwxyz	Q2	3000 EUR
46	CAM improve­ments for machin­ing metals	davidg­ilka­uf­man	Q2	3500 USD
47	Assem­bly Solver Inter­face Abstrac­tion and Alter­na­tive Solver Implementation	ours­land	Q2	2000 USD
48	Update OSH Auto­mat­ed Doc­u­men­ta­tion for FreeCAD 1.0	pieter­hi­j­ma	Q2	2000 EUR
50	Pro­mot­ing Aca­d­e­m­ic and Edu­ca­tion­al use of FreeCAD via tar­get­ed writ­ten tutorials	con­crete­dog	Q3	2000 GBP
51	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Assem­bly work­bench — Q3	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q3	3000 EUR
52	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Sketch­er work­bench — Q3	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q3	3000 EUR
53	Tech­Draw: Rework anno­ta­tion tools — Repost	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q3	2000 EUR
54	Tech­Draw: New Page — Repost	Pad­dle­Stroke	declined	2000 EUR
55	Part­De­sign: Rev­o­lu­tion Two directions	Pad­dle­Stroke	declined	1800 EUR
58	Design Sys­tem and Style Guidelines	kadet1090	Q3	5000 EUR
59	Addons and Devel­op­ers Portal	mne­sar­co	declined	8000 USD
60	[LENS] Enhanced Authen­ti­ca­tion, Brand­ing Cus­tomiza­tion, and Tru­e­NAS Inte­gra­tion for Lens Platform	amrit3701	Q3, OO	12250 USD
61	CAM improve­ments for the Adap­tive operation	davidg­ilka­uf­man	Q3	4250 USD
62	Sky domes, sun radi­a­tions analy­sis module	Fran­cis­co-Rosa	Q3	2000 USD
63	FreeCAD video tutorials	howtofreecad	declined	Unknown
64	CNC Milling Machine Tutorial	bkmgit	declined	1300 EUR
65	Selec­tion sys­tem enhance­ments / overhaul	tetek­toza	Q4	3000 EUR
67	Ond­sel Lens and Lens addon documentation	prok­ou­dine	Q4, OO	1000 EUR
68	Selec­tion Sys­tem Code Refactoring	tetek­toza	declined	4000 EUR
69	Selec­tion sys­tem enhance­ments / over­haul pt. 2	tetek­toza	declined	3500 EUR
70	Doc­u­ment Toponaming	pieter­hi­j­ma	declined	8000 EUR
71	Sun analy­sis, direct radi­a­tions and irra­di­ances analy­sis module	Fran­cis­co-Rosa	declined	2000 EUR
72	KiCon­nect PCB Work­bench [Time Com­mit­ment, Ecosystem]	mor­gan­rallen	Q4	5200 EUR
73	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Assem­bly work­bench — Q4	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q4	3000 EUR
74	Main­te­nance, improve­ment and devel­op­ment of new fea­tures on the Sketch­er work­bench — Q4	Pad­dle­Stroke	Q4	3000 EUR

The aver­age grant request was approx­i­mate­ly EUR 3,650 with a medi­an of EUR 3,000, and a high­est request of EUR 10,500.

Here is the break­down by quar­ters, with con­ver­sion to EUR where applicable:

• Q1: EUR 25,590
• Q2: EUR 24,085
• Q3: EUR 30,630
• Q4: EUR 15,200

The total allo­cat­ed bud­get was EUR 95,505. Note that this includes EUR 17,125 drawn from the sep­a­rate, pri­vate­ly spon­sored Ond­sel Onwards fund, as opposed to the gen­er­al fund built from com­mu­ni­ty dona­tions. This makes the total bud­get allo­ca­tion under the planned EUR80K cap.

Grants completion

Out of 31 grants approved in 2025, work on 11 has been com­plet­ed. Please note that Q4 2025 grants were approved in mid-Decem­ber, so we expect­ed at least some of the work to be com­plet­ed in 2026.

For detailed infor­ma­tion on the sta­tus of approved grants, please see the respec­tive GitHub project man­aged by Reqre­fu­sion, the grant program’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion manager.

Program Analysis

The grant pro­gram was orig­i­nal­ly designed to serve two over­lap­ping purposes:

1. Dis­trib­ute dona­tions to developers
2. Encour­age devel­op­ment in spe­cif­ic areas iden­ti­fied by FPA members

To the extent that one of the pur­pos­es of the pro­gram is sim­ply to dis­trib­ute donor mon­ey to those work­ing on FreeCAD, the pro­gram suc­ceeds rea­son­ably well. 19 dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als received mon­ey through this pro­gram in 2025. It is not a per­fect way to dis­trib­ute the funds, but it is not unreasonable.

Regard­ing encour­ag­ing devel­op­ment in spe­cif­ic need-areas, how­ev­er, the pro­gram is much less successful. 

With over two-thirds of grants fund­ed, we applied lit­tle “selec­tion pres­sure”. It was rare for either an FPA mem­ber or a grant review com­mit­tee mem­ber to vote to decline a grant on the basis of whether a pro­pos­al met some tar­get­ed need-area: most “no” votes were “val­ue for the money”-based, with a few com­ing on the basis of whether a giv­en fea­ture pro­pos­al rep­re­sent­ed some­thing we need­ed at all, not whether it fit into a larg­er plan, as well as some hes­i­ta­tion to fund out-of-core devel­op­ment work (e.g. addons).

Anoth­er prob­lem the grant pro­gram expe­ri­enced was a grant review team that pro­vid­ed very lit­tle feed­back. In many cas­es, review­ers pro­vid­ed sim­ple yes/no com­ments on grant appli­ca­tions. Fur­ther, even when pro­vid­ed with com­mit­tee feed­back, FPA vot­ers seemed to find lit­tle val­ue in it, instead form­ing their own opin­ions inde­pen­dent of any com­ment from the committee. 

Recruit­ing review­ers also proved dif­fi­cult: despite sev­er­al vocal indi­vid­u­als on the forums express­ing opin­ions about how the FPA spends the grant mon­ey, none of those peo­ple vol­un­teered to serve on the committee.

2026 Program Modifications

Here is what we are like­ly to change for the 2026 program:

1. The bud­get for the grant pro­gram should be reduced to EUR 40,000, divid­ed into EUR 10,000 quar­ter­ly grant rounds. The freed-up bud­get should be used for the bug boun­ty pro­gram and ongo­ing positions.
2. The tech­ni­cal grant review com­mit­tee should be eliminated.
3. The FPA should choose some small num­ber of action­able focus areas for each year’s pro­gram to help guide which appli­ca­tions should be select­ed (and vot­ers should take care to respect that selection).
4. Grants should be lim­it­ed to one appli­ca­tion per devel­op­er per quarter.
5. A “no” vote on a grant should require a state­ment from the vot­er about why they are vot­ing no, and that feed­back should be anonymized and pro­vid­ed to the grant appli­cant with the notice of their grant’s being declined for funding.