2024 Budget

It is hard to estimate how much money we'll have to work with this year, so for now our budget is pretty straightforward:

• Spend ~90% of our income to bring Alice on as a full-time maintainer, until she is paid at our target salary of $150,000.
• Use the remaining ~10% to build up some buffer funds

Hire Alice as a Full-Time Maintainer

We have exactly one focus for the short term: bring Alice on full-time. For years, Alice has dedicated significant time to the project as a Maintainer. She has been our primary project manager: wrangling issues, keeping the merge train running, connecting developers to the right parts of the project, and doing the work that ensures we can harness and enable our ever increasing developer community. Not to mention her extensive technical contributions and documentation work!

If you have participated in Bevy's development, you are probably intimately aware of two things:

1. Project management is our bottleneck.
2. Alice is a world-class project manager.

In addition to performing the general "project management" role, Alice has the following specific priorities when she starts full-time:

1. The New Bevy Book: The new Bevy Book aims to be a complete, always up-to-date, and constantly improving guide to using Bevy. Alice has already contributed content and helped facilitate the book's production. If she joins full-time, she will work to finish it, in addition to helping others contribute.
2. Coordinating the Development of ECS Relations: Relations are an ECS feature that enable connecting entities to each other via special components called Relations. These are an often-requested feature that will make a number of scenarios (such as parent-child relationships) much nicer. Alice will work to coordinate this effort and fill in functionality gaps.
3. Building an Action System for Input Devices: Bevy sorely needs an official way to define "input actions", which are then mapped (and remapped) to inputs from one or more input devices (for example: a Jump action that is mapped to the "A" button on controllers and "Spacebar" on keyboards). Alice built leafwing-input-manager, which is a popular third-party Bevy plugin that does exactly that. Alice plans on taking the lessons learned there to build a proper first-party solution to this problem.

Alice deserves to be paid for her work, and Bevy needs her full-time. Our goal for the Bevy Foundation is to pay reasonably competitive, roughly market rate salaries. Therefore, our first goal is to pay Alice a salary of $150,000 a year.

We all believe Alice is worth at least that much, but given that funds will take time to build up, Alice has agreed to take a pay cut while things spin up.

Build Up Some Buffer

To ensure we can respond to things as they come up, we'll want to build up some initial buffer funds. We'll eventually need to spend some money to help keep Bevy Foundation operational and compliant with state and federal regulations. We also anticipate minor hosting + infrastructure costs to start popping up soon. And once we start exploring other foundation programs, we'll likely need some funds to get those going. Best to be prepared!