Avalonia UI in 2024: Growth, Challenges, and the Road Ahead
A look at how we've been building a sustainable business around Avalonia in 2024.
A look at how we've been building a sustainable business around Avalonia in 2024.
As the year draws to a close, we take this opportunity to reflect on the last 12 months and to share our plans for 2025. This year has been an important one for us, marked by significant growth, difficult decisions, and exciting opportunities.
Much like in last year’s retrospective, the goal of this post is to provide you with a transparent look at our strategy for creating a sustainable business around our popular OSS project.
Let's start with community growth. Our month-over-month growth has moderated from last year's impressive 30% to an average of 14.29%, but the absolute numbers tell the important story. The community has grown more than seven times compared to last year.
GitHub stars, while just one metric, provide a window into this growth. We've seen a 25% increase in stargazers over the past 12 months, making us the most-starred cross-platform UI solution for .NET. Remarkably, this was achieved entirely through community-driven efforts, without a dedicated marketing team! 
For those of you actively building with Avalonia who haven't yet starred the repository, we invite you to take a moment to show your support, as this helps to raise the visibility of the project.
As discussed last year, the increase in adoption directly translates into more work associated with managing the project.
Our growth tells a story about the challenges of scaling open-source projects. We've handled 7,000 issues since the projects inception, maintaining a 78% resolution rate, but the numbers reveal both our success and growing pains. Community engagement has tripled since 2018 to 1,421 issues in 2023, and while we closed nearly as many as we received last year, our 2024 backlog has already grown by 297 issues.
This increase requires careful balancing. Even with more talented developers joining the team and ever-greater investment in OSS, community demands are challenging to keep up with. We need more team members to sustain our momentum, but funding those positions sustainably is a challenge we're working hard to solve.
The reality is that scaling with our community requires funding to support the team behind the project. Balancing open-source growth with commercial viability remains our greatest challenge heading into 2025, and we're determined to meet it head-on.
When we talk about sustainability, we're not just throwing around a buzzword; we're describing a fundamental philosophy that informs every decision we make. Let me share a perspective from my time at Xamarin, which raised $82.8M in venture capital. While this funding helped advance the .NET ecosystem, giving us the cross-platform foundation we build on today, it exemplifies a different approach to building a technology company.
Many venture-backed businesses operate on a simple premise: rapid growth at any cost, funded by burning through capital. While this can accelerate development and market expansion, it often prioritises explosive growth over long-term stability, with future funding rounds and exits shifting focus from serving the community to serving the bottom line. We've seen this impact various companies across the industry, at the expense of the ecosystems they were built to support.
We've deliberately chosen a different path. From the outset, we've focused on building a business that values sustainable growth. This doesn't mean we're opposed to investment; on the contrary, partnerships can be invaluable when aligned with the right goals. We believe in working with people who truly understand our mission, technology, and commitment to the open-core business model. So far, this hasn't been our experience with investment firms.
By prioritising sustainability, the business is grounded in real-world demand, where growth is driven by revenue and community needs. This ensures we can focus on creating a stable company that serves our users first and foremost. Admittedly, this approach comes with trade-offs: not every challenge can be solved immediately, and some initiatives require commercialisation to fund their development. But these are challenges we're willing to embrace because they allow us to stay true to our principles.
With that said, I think it's worth looking at the numbers. Like last year, we want to be as open as possible about every part of the business. Let's dig into how we're generating revenue, and how we're putting it to good use.
This year we’ve built upon the successful revenue diversification efforts initiated in 2023. Our primary objective was to mitigate the concentration risk faced in 2022 when a single customer accounted for 70% of our revenue. Through focused efforts, we reduced this risk to 14.80% in 2023, a significant improvement but still above our target maximum of 10%.
I am pleased to share that in 2024, we have not only achieved our diversification goal, with no single customer contributing more than 10% of our total revenue, but we have also experienced a 44.03% growth in revenue compared to the previous year. This revenue growth has enabled us to reinvest in Avalonia and continue to deliver exceptional experiences for all our users.
It's crucial to emphasise that almost every euro of revenue earned is being reinvested back into creating a better platform for everyone. Our mission is to create lasting value for our customers, open-source users, and team members.
Let's take a look at our revenue. Like last year, our revenue is mostly made up of Avalonia XPF, support agreements and custom development projects.
We had a 100% increase in the number of projects we took on compared to the previous year, despite being highly selective about the projects we accepted. This selective approach led to an impressive 108.33% increase in revenue generated from our development services.
We have consciously favored smaller, targeted projects over more long-term, involved projects. This decision has allowed us to focus on initiatives that contribute to the improvement of our open-source projects. Approximately 70% of the custom development work we did resulted in PRs that improved Avalonia, to the benefit of the whole communtiy.
As we look ahead to 2025, we will maintain our selective approach to project work, prioritising collaborations that align with our goals. Additionally, we will continue to connect our customers with experienced technical partners like UXDivers for more comprehensive, long-term projects.
We've seen a 41.67% increase in the number of support customers, while maintaining a 100% customer satisfaction score. Our average first response is within 11 hours, and resolution within 16 hours, which is well below the one business day SLA of our enterprise tier.
Our support agreements continue to be a significant part of our business, accounting for 30.8% of our total revenue. Despite maintaining the same price for our enterprise tier, we have seen a 34.12% increase in revenue compared to 2023. We believe that our support agreements create a mutually beneficial relationship between Avalonia and the companies we work with. By investing in Avalonia, these organisations gain access to our deep knowledge and expertise, enabling them to create exceptional software solutions. In turn, their support plays a vital role in the continuous development and enhancement of Avalonia as a platform.
Not every initiative this year delivered the results we’d hoped for. One experiment involved offering lower-cost support agreements to make our offerings more accessible to independent developers and small companies. This was inspired by community feedback, with many citing pricing as a barrier to adoption.
The results were enlightening. Despite vocal community requests for lower prices, our indie-focused tiers accounted for just 0.625% of our annual revenue. This "say-do gap", where potential customers advocate strongly for lower prices but don't convert when those prices are offered, is a well-documented phenomenon that we've now experienced firsthand
After much deliberation, we made the difficult decision to discontinue these tiers. This wasn't an easy choice, as we deeply value indie developers and the vital role they play in our community. However, the data clearly shows we need to be focusing our efforts on our enterprise offering, which has demonstrated strong product-market fit.
XPF has achieved remarkable growth in 2024, with a 183.33% increase in the number of licences sold compared to the previous year. This has generated a 76.19% increase in revenue, even after a considerable 33% reduction in license cost.
Notably, the average deal duration has dropped dramatically, from several months to less than a month, demonstrating that customers are making quicker decisions after starting a trial.
A huge celebration for us this year has been LINQPad’s adoption of XPF to bring their much loved WPF app to macOS.
LINQPad is one of our favourite .NET developer tools, and we’re thrilled that Joe chose XPF to bring it to macOS. If you’re a fan of LINQPad, we’re sure you’ll enjoy experiencing the upcoming macOS release powered by XPF.
Looking ahead to 2025, we anticipate continued strong interest in XPF as organisations increasingly realise the value of extending their WPF applications to new platforms.
Similar to the Indie support agreements, the demand for Indie XPF was significantly lower than anticipated. Several factors contributed to this, including the removal of Linux support, which was based on data collected over the past 18 months that showed Linux as the most expensive platform to support. As a result, Indie XPF was limited to Windows and macOS, which lowered interest. Due to the low uptake, we decided to discontinue Indie XPF. Existing Indie licenses will remain valid and be eligible for renewal after 12 months.
Furthermore, we have decided to pause adding support for WASM to XPF until 2026. This decision is based on the current immaturity of .NET WASM tooling. Although WASM support is available in XPF through a private preview, we do not feel it is ready for commercial release until the tooling can deliver the expected developer experience. We will continue to monitor the development of .NET WASM tooling and reassess its viability as .NET 10 progresses.
Finally, let's discuss donations. While GitHub donations saw an increase this year compared to last year, they only accounted for a tiny fraction of our total revenue. The Amazon sponsorship, which had been a significant contributor to our donation income, ended early in the year, resulting in a sharp decline. Since then, donation levels have stabilised, but the overall contribution remains low.
Despite our efforts to encourage donations to the project, only 0.0176% of our monthly active users are currently donating. This stark disparity highlights the challenges of sustaining a popular open-source project primarily through donations. To put this into perspective, if every user who has built with Avalonia this year contributed just €5, we would have generated enough income to hire an additional 50 developers, nearly quintupling our team.
We recognise that justifying donations can be difficult for organisations. For this reason, we ask that those using Avalonia professionally consider purchasing our upcoming Avalonia Accelerate offering, as a way to support the project. This provides an easily justifiable transaction for businesses while still contributing to the ongoing development and maintenance of Avalonia.
As with last year, our biggest expense is wages. The increase in revenue has enabled us to expand our team to eleven, with active recruiting underway for additional roles.
Let's explore how we're spending the revenue we generate.
As expected, our most significant expense is staff wages, at 91.1% of our expenditure.
While our service costs only account for 2.5% of operating expenses, they represent essential infrastructure and tools we can't operate without. Our highest costs are in sales tools (33.39% of service costs), followed by team collaboration (28.57%) and development infrastructure (15.94%).
Marketing represented just 2.1% of our total expenses, with our efforts split between traditional digital advertising and community engagement. While we experimented with podcast sponsorships and various digital ad platforms, we struggled to directly correlate this spending with new business generation.
This has reinforced what we've consistently observed: authentic community engagement drives our growth more effectively than paid advertising. We're refocusing our marketing efforts on organic channels.
While our engineering roles have historically been filled through our incredible community, a testament to the talent within open source, expanding beyond technical roles required us to work with external recruiters.
Moving forward, we're refining our recruitment strategy. Our success in direct candidate sourcing has demonstrated we can build an exceptional team without relying heavily on traditional recruitment channels and their associated costs.
This year, we have engaged deeply with our customers to identify the most impactful features for both our open-source and our commercial offerings. We have created an exciting roadmap for both Avalonia Accelerate and v12, which we're working hard to deliver.
Our upcoming commercial offering, Avalonia Accelerate, will complement the open-source project, offering advanced tools and capabilities to make developers more productive when building with Avalonia. These commercial features will help fund the ongoing development of Avalonia, ensuring we can continue to improve the core framework while investing in new tools and initiatives.
When we announced Accelerate, it sparked valuable community discussions about the balance between open-source and commercial offerings. Some vocal community members suggested that 9 of our 11 announced features should be built as free, open-source software. We value all feedback, but must balance against sustainability realities.
While we'd love to make all features freely available, the math simply doesn't work. Each feature represents significant development investment, ongoing maintenance and support costs. Making this commercial isn't just about covering development costs; it's about generating the revenue we need to grow our team and continue improving both commercial and open-source offerings.
We're working hard to ensure it delivers exceptional value while generating the revenue needed to support our growth ambitions, and we look forward to releasing the first phase in early 2025.
2024 has been a huge year for us. We've seen tremendous growth, made tough decisions, and emerged with a crystal-clear vision for 2025 and beyond. The story of this year has been accelerated enterprise adoption, expanded team, and creation of a comprehensive product roadmap.
Our strategy is simple but decisive: maintain our world-class open-source core while building a sustainable commercial ecosystem that drives continuous innovation. With Avalonia Accelerate on the horizon, we're positioned for significant growth in 2025.
To our community, from individual contributors to enterprise partners, thank you for being part of this journey. Avalonia isn't just surviving in the cross-platform UI space; we're leading it. And we're just getting started.
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