A year ago today, I announced that Devolutions had committed $3 million over three years to fund Avalonia's open-source development. I want to share what it actually changed, because the sponsorship didn't just fund more work. It dramatically changed the shape of our company.
For those of you unfamiliar with Devolutions, they're a Québec-based leader in remote connection management, including RDP and SSH, and Privileged Access Management (PAM). Avalonia is a core technology in their cross-platform strategy, making this more than just philanthropy. They're investing in the core infrastructure they depend on. It’s the sort of investment that helps sustain the open-source ecosystem that all of us benefit from.
The Numbers Tell the First Half of the Story
Let's get started with the changes we can measure.
In the twelve months since the sponsorship began, the team has more than doubled. We're now 20 people, up from fewer than 10, with that growth going almost entirely into engineering, documentation, and quality.
The larger team has completely changed how we work. With the open-source budget secured, the open-source roadmap no longer has to compete with commercial delivery for the same people and the same calendar. We now have the capacity to properly split our focus between the framework and our commercial products, resulting in a roadmap moving far faster than at any point in Avalonia's history.
Docs
We hired our first dedicated technical writer, and our documentation has been transformed. The number of guides alone grew by 125% with the release of Avalonia 12. Anyone who has been using Avalonia for a while will know that docs were once a regular source of frustration for the community. They're quickly becoming a strength.
Six months ago, a single-day spike in visitors to the docs site was remarkable enough that our technical writer flagged it to the team. Our daily average numbers now sit comfortably above that peak. What was once considered an exceptional day has quickly become the norm.
Where we once would get emails complaining about our docs, we now receive emails praising them. Not "this is better than it was," but, and I'm quoting one that landed recently from a developer:
I just want to give a shout out to your documentation department and all those involved. The work they have done has been fantastic.
There are few metrics more satisfying than a stranger going out of their way to tell you something is good.
Quality
We also hired our first full-time QA lead on the principle that shipping faster is only beneficial if we continue to ship high-quality work. There's still plenty to improve, and no one inside Avalonia thinks the job is finished, but the direction is very different from where we were a year ago.
Ecosystem
The momentum wasn't just internal either. Over the past year, we announced a partnership with Google's Flutter team to bring Impeller, their next-generation GPU renderer, to .NET. We've also been working with Microsoft to bring .NET MAUI to Linux and WebAssembly, powered by Avalonia. We've seen the broader ecosystem grow, such as the recent announcement of yFiles for Avalonia.
This is all possible because a team that has doubled in size, shipped a major release and accelerated its roadmap naturally starts to attract companies that want to build alongside it.
The usage numbers tell the rest of the story. In the whole of 2025, Avalonia projects were built over 122 million times. In the first six months of 2026 alone, that figure has already passed 410 million. The framework isn't just improving; it's being adopted at a rate we've never seen before.
The Second Half Is What We Chose to Give Away
The clearest way to show what the sponsorship changed is to start with the decision that nearly went the other way.
Wayland support. The real cost concern was never just the initial development of Wayland support. It was the long tail of keeping it working, across the enormous variety of distros and compositors that Linux users actually run. We had all but committed to making it a paid feature, and from the perspective of a small team with limited resources, that decision made perfect sense.
Then the sponsorship changed the equation. We've committed to releasing Wayland support as FOSS under the MIT licence, like the rest of the framework, rather than locking it behind a paywall. Initial support has been merged and will be available in the upcoming Avalonia 12.1 release. Every Linux user who runs Avalonia on a modern compositor will benefit from a decision we couldn't have justified a year ago.
The WebView control tells a similar story. It started life as a paid component in our commercial offering, and by typical commercial reasoning it should have stayed that way. Instead, we open-sourced it. If you need to embed web content in an Avalonia app, that capability is now part of the core framework, free for everyone.
And then there's the decision that impacts most of our users. When we developed our new tooling, the plan was that the IDE extensions and tools would be exclusively for paying customers.
We were able to make a different choice. One that we believe is better for the long-term health of the ecosystem. We made our hugely improved VS Code extension entirely free. We removed any friction to adoption by eliminating the Avalonia account requirement and usage restrictions. We launched Avalonia Community, a tier that puts our other paid tooling in the hands of non-commercial developers at zero cost. More than 100,000 developers have now used our improved tooling entirely free of charge.
None of that was in our business plan before Devolutions. The financials are easy to understand. The Devolutions sponsorship helps fund our team as we create value for everyone. But what actually shifted these decisions wasn't the money itself, but rather the confidence the additional safety net provided, enabling us to make choices that look generous on a spreadsheet but are, in fact, the right long-term strategy for an open-source project. We could only afford to give the tooling away because we had a partner who believed that investing in the whole ecosystem pays dividends for everyone.
So if you're using Avalonia Community today, the new VS Code extension, the FOSS web view, planning to adopt Wayland, or just reading our hugely improved documentation, none of those decisions would have been possible without the support of Devolutions.
Montreal (Meeting Devolutions)
Earlier this year I flew to Montreal to spend a few days with the Devolutions team at their company retreat. I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on Avalonia, meeting people from almost every department, and spending time with their leadership team.
I haven't felt the way I did over those few days for an extremely long time (probably the last time I truly felt that way was when I joined Xamarin). The energy was infectious, and the sense that everyone cared about the same thing was palpable.
Culture is hard to convey second-hand, so instead I'll describe two things I saw. During one of the all-hands (which was remarkably candid), the team shared initiatives they're taking to improve the space around their campus, not as a company perk, but as something the wider local community would also benefit from. And I spoke with a team member who had started at Devolutions as a support engineer. Their talent was noticed, and they were given more opportunities. They now work as part of the marketing team. They, like everyone else I spoke to, had stories that demonstrated the company's caring culture. I don't say that lightly.
A great deal of business at this level of success is incredibly transactional, and some of it is ruthless. Devolutions are neither. They're kind, and they've built a thriving company with a set of values that closely mirrors our own.
I flew home with a thought I've not been able to shake since. Devolutions is a shining example of how I want Avalonia to carry itself as we build our company. Success doesn't require ruthlessness. You can create a successful business without sanding off the parts that make it human. Devolutions is proof of that, and it was refreshing to experience first-hand.
Building a Business That Can Outlast the Sponsorship
It would be fair to read all that and wonder how giving away tooling and open-sourcing features we had planned to charge for adds up to a business that lasts. So let me be transparent about our finances (as much as I can be).
We're not choosing to optimise for profit. Instead, we're reinvesting almost everything we earn to make Avalonia better. That means more engineers, better docs, faster releases, and more given away. We run a lean operation with zero debt and zero outside pressure to change course.
Q1 2026 was the best quarter in the company's history, and Q2 is shaping up every bit as strong. Our commercial revenue in the first half of this year is on track to roughly match the total for 2025. That's before the sponsorship is counted. The growth has also brought channel maturity, with us now selling through 19 resellers worldwide, a number that continues to grow.
Freed from the pressure to set open-source work against commercial deadlines, both sides have flourished.
This is significant because a sponsorship like this comes with a responsibility. The comfortable path would be to let it quietly become a crutch. The right one is to treat it as a catalyst, and that's exactly what's happening. The commercial side is growing, the community is expanding, and the framework continues to improve. Devolutions proved that corporate sponsorship of open source works, not as charity but as a model that benefits everyone involved. We believe in that model enough that we've created a sponsorship programme for other companies who want to back the framework's future alongside them.
By taking the pressure off at exactly the right moment, Devolutions gave us the room to build something more durable, and improve the ecosystem around Avalonia and cross-platform .NET development.
What Year Two Looks Like
Remarkably, we're still only one year into the partnership. Our team is bigger, the framework is stronger, the docs are unrecognisable, the roadmap is shipping faster, and the tooling is in the hands of over a hundred thousand developers who would otherwise have gone without.
But the funding isn't the part I value most. It's the relationship. David and his team have never once told us what to build, what to prioritise, or how to run the company. They trusted us to make the right calls and then backed us in making them. That kind of trust is rare in any commercial arrangement, and it has been transformative.
What they have done, generously and consistently, is share what they've learned from building their own company. When we ask for advice, they give it freely, drawn from their experience. That kind of partnership doesn't show up in a sponsorship agreement, but it has shaped how we think about our business.
To David Hervieux, to his leadership team, and to every person at Devolutions who decided that backing an open-source UI framework was worth $3 million of their money: thank you. You've earned far more than a blog post, but this is a start.
We're building something special at Avalonia. Having a partner like Devolutions makes me even more certain we'll get there.