La Contre-Voie has a tough time: help us stay on course!
Bilan sur la santé financière de l’association
The year 2025 marks a historic turning point for La Contre-Voie: we have recruited our first employee, launched five new services and our instant messaging service… Today, we are feeling the backlash: the transition from a volunteer-based organization to an employer is very costly, and we are struggling to meet the financial demands.
Like many other organizations, we are facing a decline in donations: times are tough for everyone, and this is affecting the financial capacity of our donors.
🔗First approach: diversifying our funding
We first tried to diversify our sources of funding by launching our à la carte service offering, with the firm intention of supporting associations and other organizations in their de-Googling efforts at a fair and solidarity-based price.
For us, practicing fair pricing means ensuring that the financial resources of the organizations that contact us are never a barrier to the use of our free software tools, even if it means significantly reducing the rates we offer to small organizations.
🔗The results in a few figures…
From September 2024 to November 2025, we digitally equipped 15 organizations: 7 associations, 2 cooperatives, 4 individuals, and 2 companies. The most requested service is Nextcloud (9 organizations), followed by WordPress (7 organizations). We are far from the figures achieved by other “giants” such as Zaclys or Framasoft, but for a first launch, we are quite satisfied :)
If we add up the current rates for each service, this represents a total of €3,600 in digital services! But since we practice solidarity rates, only €2,200 of this €3,600 is collected by the association. We can afford to offer these solidarity rates because we rely on our other sources of income to make up for this “free” portion.
Ultimately, hosting services would allow us to achieve significant economies of scale, but we don’t yet have enough beneficiaries for the difference to be significant: our entire infrastructure (and that alone) costs us around €100 per month, and this amount continues to increase as we upgrade our servers.
In short: between solidarity rates (which we consider necessary, but which cost us money) and the lack of beneficiaries in the first year of launch, this source of revenue is not yet sufficient to contribute significantly to personnel expenses.
We anticipated this slow start, which is why we applied for grants this year, as we believe it makes sense for the cultivation of digital commons to be partially funded by public funds.
🔗Grants: four applications, €49,400 requested, €8,200 obtained
These items are already included in our moral report, but we would also like to highlight them here.
In 2025, we undertook to prepare four grant applications to finance our digital support program, in particular to support associations; two of them were granted to us.
The Recrutement associatif public grant offered by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region was the most attractive: available to sustain a new salaried position in an association, it provides €10,000 in funding for the first year, €7,000 in the second year, and €4,000 in the third year, for a total of €21,000 over three years.
Unfortunately, we were not awarded the grant, mainly because it is highly sought after and few applications are accepted (1 in 5), and because our projected budget did not offer sufficient guarantees that our organization would be able to sustain employment beyond the three years covered by the grant.
We also submitted an application for the private grant Digital technology for a more equitable society, offered by the Afnic Foundation, for an amount of €12,000 over two years, which was also refused without reason.
The state grant FDVA 2 − Operating Costs was granted to us for our activities in 2025, for an amount of €1,000 out of the €2,000 requested.
Finally, we reapplied to the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region for the Mutations associatives grant, which had been refused in 2024, for an amount of €14,400 over 18 months. We were asked to revise our provisional budget, as the amount requested was too high in relation to the resources that the Region wishes to commit; we therefore requested €7,200 for 18 months, and the Region has just accepted our request.
We would also like to thank the Region for choosing to support us financially, with a sum that represents a significant portion of our budget.
🔗A fragile balance sheet
However, this balance sheet remains a mixed victory for us; a full-time salaried position at the minimum wage costs at least €25,000 per year, and we are still far from reaching this amount, both in terms of subsidies and donations or hosting services.
La Contre-Voie is also preparing for the non-renewal of the only employment contract signed within the organization in 2026, due to a lack of financial resources — although this does not compromise the idea of hiring again in the future, if the association’s financial situation allows it.
🔗Is La Contre-Voie in danger?
Rest assured: we are not about to close or abandon our services, no matter what happens. Even if La Contre-Voie were to become a volunteer-only association again one day, we would continue to maintain the digital services currently offered and provide support by email.
Furthermore, even if the association is likely to be in deficit for its fiscal year (2025-2026) for the first time in its existence, we have enough cash reserves to weather the storm and reduce expenses for the following years.
Of course, we are never immune to a serious incident that could ultimately compromise the survival of the association, because nothing lasts forever; but if that should ever happen, we will do our best to notify you several months in advance and facilitate the migration to other ethical digital structures if necessary.
🔗A star to lift your spirits
If you find that our actions are meaningful, and you want to — and are able to — give us the means to go further, then we invite you to donate to La Contre-Voie.
For the 2024-2025 fiscal year, donations represent 50% of our total funding and remain essential to guaranteeing our independence and survival, even when subsidies are not forthcoming.
Next year, we hope to complete the objectives of our roadmap by consolidating the services we launched this year, and we may open new services depending on the needs identified.
We are counting on your support!