fidzu : Drupal

When I took on the role of Interim CEO, I committed to being direct about our finances and noted that our earlier audits already told much of the story. The board has now released our 2025 audit report, which was provided to the Board of Directors of the Drupal Association on 8 July 2026 and approved on 25 July 2026. It provides additional context and detail, but does not change the overall picture or our path forward.

To be clear, nothing in this audit means any of the services the project depends on are at risk. What this audit does is help us to understand the status quo so that we can take appropriate action moving forward.

The DA Has Been Operating With a Structural Deficit

The DA spent about $451,000 more on operations than we brought in last year (2025), and that followed a larger shortfall the year before ($923,000).

Those two years are not cleanly comparable, because the 2025 audit also restates our previously audited 2024 results. Our auditors determined that about $353,000 of membership revenue had been recognized in 2024 that should instead have been allocated to 2025, when it was actually earned. This was a non-cash correction to our books: no money changed hands, and nothing was lost or misspent.

Together, 2024 and 2025 produced a combined shortfall of about $1.15M, which averages roughly $573,000 a year. Our current forecast puts 2026 on the same path.

Our cash reserves (the unrestricted funds we can actually spend on operations) have decreased by about 60% since the end of 2022, to roughly $960,000, which represents 2.3 months of operating expenses. Board policy sets a six-month target and a three-month reserve minimum. 2025 is the first year since 2019 that the DA has failed to meet the minimum. The DA remains a going concern and is not in danger of becoming insolvent, but it is time for action.

Revenue Growth Has Not Covered the Costs of our Strategic Investments

Coming out of 2022 with strong reserves, the board approved a three-year strategic plan on 6 June 2023 and chose to put some of its surplus toward ambitious, community-requested investments in marketing and project support. Funding strategic growth is how excess reserves are best leveraged.

These investments have had a measurable impact:

• Contributions to Drupal strategic product innovation tripled, reaching 211,037 organizational credits in 2025, a 54% increase over 2024.

• We reached 106 Drupal Certified Partners under enhanced "maker" requirements, roughly double the 2022 figure.

• 43 people were brought into Drupal leadership roles for the first time, against a goal of 38.

• We adopted and executed a go-to-market plan for the launch of Drupal CMS, and built marketing capacity inside the DA for the first time.

However, the sustainability of these efforts long-term was tied to a goal which we did not meet:

• Increase Drupal Association total revenues by 3X, from $3.49M in 2022 to $10.5M in 2026 to better support mission-driven activities.

Our reported revenue did grow about 25% between 2022 and 2025. While 2025 is one of our largest revenue years on record, this figure is misleading, because most of the growth is in non-monetary services provided in trade (described in more detail below). Putting that aside, the Association's cash revenue grew 5% over three years while out-of-pocket costs grew 27%.

The gap is paid for out of our reserves. Reserves are the right instrument for starting something and the wrong instrument for running it. Funding our strategic initiatives from reserves was the right decision for the duration of the strategic plan, but while that plan ended last year, the work has continued without a viable funding plan.

Marketing and project support are precisely the kind of mission-aligned work the DA should be doing. So the task in front of us is to fund it properly: each program examined discretely, with its own revenue plan, and held to revenue neutrality now that it has moved out of pilot and into operations.

Infrastructure Costs are Rising (and Invisible)

In 2022 we spent $1.3M running Drupal.org (the Web site, composer endpoints, GitLab, CI, authentication, and the global CDN), and in 2025 we spent $2.1M. That is up 61% in three years. It is the Drupal Association's single largest cost, and it has no direct funding mechanism. Every organization that uses Drupal relies on this infrastructure, but none of them are asked to pay for it, because we have never built a way for them to.

For most of Drupal's history that did not matter, because the surplus revenue from DrupalCon covered the costs of Drupal.org. However, since 2022 the DrupalCon surplus has fallen from about $994,000 to about $227,000. While event costs have continued to increase since we resumed in-person events, event revenue has gone down.

This means that we are increasingly relying on the generosity of a handful of vendors and partners who provide services for free or in trade for sponsorship placements. That generosity has grown from $249,249 in 2022 to $1,011,995 in 2025 and now covers nearly half of what we spend on Drupal.org. These services in trade and donated services have not reported in our monthly reports because they were "non-cash"; they appeared only at audit.

The remainder of the infrastructure spending gap must be paid for out of general operating revenue, and failing that, out of reserves. These costs increased from $56,825 in 2022 to $859,384 in 2025.

It is also important to note that these numbers do not account for work that is deferred because the funding is not there to pay for it. This technical debt does not appear on any of our financial statements, but is a growing liability that will need to be paid for at some point.

The bottom line is that while our cash spending on infrastructure has remained steady, we have a rising essential cost that currently has no funding model attached to it yet.

Unpacking the Timeline

The fiscal year 2024 closed 31 December 2024. The initial audit for 2024 was released in July 2025 showing $570,000 of deficit. Then in July 2026, it was restated downward to a $923,000 deficit as part of the 2025 audit.

While the Drupal Association CEO is accountable for the organization's day-to-day operations, the board provides oversight over the organization's budget and finances. This oversight requires timely, accurate, and consistent financial reporting.

The monthly reports that the board's Finance Committee reviewed and the audited statements published 6 months after the year close were prepared on different bases, with nothing reconciling the two. The Finance Committee struggled to get consistent answers or clarity about what individual figures included. In April 2026, Finance Committee asked our auditors to examine the reporting revenue recognition practices directly. That request is what produced the restatement of 2024 as part of the 2025 audit. This also explains how long it took to know where we stood in 2024.

The Path Forward

The responsible approach is to act now, while we can still make changes on our own terms rather than in a crisis. Some of this is already underway and the rest has dates attached to it.

As Interim CEO, I am operationally accountable to make sure that the board has access to an annual budget that is actively managed with variances mitigated; receives consistent, contextualized and timely financial reports; and that robust internal controls and workflows are in place. This clarity will give the Finance Committee and the board what they need to exercise proper oversight within the policy guardrails they have set.

Our internal reporting will be reconciled to audit-basis accounting, so that the figures the board governs against during the year are as close as possible to the ones we publish after it; non-cash arrangements will be recorded as they occur rather than at year end; and our reserve position will be reported on a single defined basis, against both policy thresholds, every period.

Drupal.org will be presented as a program with a cost that the Drupal Association is accountable for funding. The Association needs a durable way to fund Drupal.org rather than the patchwork indirect one we have now. These issues are not unique to Drupal, and I am looking forward to hearing others' thoughts, but be assured that I do not intend to solve a funding problem by reducing the services the community relies on.

Within the coming months, I will publish:

• What each part of our work actually costs and how it is funded

• The full costs of Drupal.org as a measurable figure, which will be the first time anyone, including the board, will have seen that number

• An updated 2026 forecast and preliminary mitigation plan

This fall, I will prepare a two-year 2027-2028 Operating Budget with the Finance Committee that the board will be able to review and approve before the end of the year.

Nothing about the 2025 audit changes our commitment, our mission or the direction we need to go. It just adds a little urgency. I am focused on co-creating a financial model where the work sustaining Drupal rests on a foundation that is resilient and sustainable for the next long-term CEO.

Author: Will Huggins

In our previous blog posts, we've talked about how our growing ecosystem - now backed by 32 global partner organisations and a dedicated delivery team - is structured to build a secure, stable, and highly integrable AI-native digital experience platform.

So what does this mean for your day-to-day digital communications and marketing operations? How do you translate this into improved experiences for your audience, higher conversion rates, and reduced cost?

To win in the age of AI, digital leaders don't just need faster ways to generate content or build great digital experiences. They need a platform that helps them move at maximum speed, while still maintaining the highest quality and content standards.

Here is an inside look at the key features on the Drupal AI 2026 roadmap, focused on the outcomes that matter most to digital communications and marketing teams: speed, brand safety, and measurable ROI.

"Prompt-to-Published" Page Building (Using Your Real Design System)

Many AI-powered page builders on the market suffer from what digital leaders call "AI Slop": random, messy, raw HTML blocks based on generic AI models. These pages can break your site's layout, look wildly off-brand, fail accessibility standards, and create the dreaded 'technical debt' for your developers to clean up.

Drupal AI's upcoming Canvas AI Page Builder operates under a completely different paradigm. It is natively component-aware.

• You can feed Canvas AI a marketing brief, a PDF, or even a screenshot. Instead of writing custom code, the AI inspects your design system, selects the most relevant, pre-approved, accessible brand components, places them in a logical conversion layout, and drafts campaign-specific copy directly within them. Your marketing team can go from a brief to a beautifully structured, accessible landing page in minutes. You get complete visual design freedom without ever breaking brand guidelines or waiting in a developer's queue.

The Brand Guardrail: Localised Nuance & Centralised Brand Voice

A major anxiety for marketing teams is brand dilution. If your team is using disconnected AI tools, your brand voice can quickly fragment, sounding professional on one page and generic on another.

Drupal AI solves this by embedding a centralised Context Control Centre directly into the CMS. This serves as the single source of truth for your brand's identity and governance rules.

• Authored Context: You define your style guides, brand vocabulary, audience personas, and strict regulatory boundaries (such as HIPAA, GDPR, or accessibility standards) once. Every AI-assisted content generation task automatically adheres to these guardrails.
• Hyper-Local Translation: For global marketing departments, translation is rarely word-for-word. Under the 2026 roadmap, Drupal AI's translation workflows don't just translate text; they analyse local nuance and adapt your localised content to fit regional cultural contexts while strictly preserving your core brand voice.

You can scale your global content footprint across multiple regions and channels, confident that every single piece of copy, everywhere, sounds exactly like you.

Closed-Loop Performance: Self-Optimizing Digital Experiences

Today, your content lives in the CMS, but your performance data is trapped inside a web analytics dashboard (like Google Analytics or Matomo), and the two systems rarely talk to each other. As a result, marketing teams often miss trends, fail to optimise low-performing pages, and struggle to scale what actually works.

Drupal AI is built to close this loop by bringing performance intelligence directly into the content creation interface.

• Intelligent Website Improvements: Drupal AI integrates directly with your analytics platform. Instead of merely showing you a static traffic report, background AI agents analyse user journeys and conversion drops.
• Actionable Optimisations: If a high-value landing page is underperforming, the AI agent automatically flags it and proposes concrete layout or copy optimisations - such as a more compelling call-to-action or a tighter, clearer headline - based on what is historically proven to convert.

No more digging through dashboards to find what's not working. Your website becomes a living, self-optimising engine, learning what works best for your audience and handing ready-to-publish optimisations directly to your content editors, bridging the gap between data and action.

Built-In Governance: Keeping Humans (and IT) Firmly in the Loop

Speed is meaningless if your IT department or compliance team vetoes your tools due to security risks. To build an AI platform organisations can trust, Drupal AI treats security and governance as structural priorities, not afterthought add-ons.

Unlike lightweight SaaS tools that operate outside of your corporate governance, Drupal AI operates entirely within your existing approval workflows and editorial permissions.

• Human-in-the-Loop Safeguards: AI agents can propose layouts, drafts, and SEO metadata, but they cannot publish them autonomously. Every change is staged in a revision branch, allowing your marketing managers to review, edit, or reject changes before they ever go live.
• Data Sovereignty and Security: Advanced security filters automatically sanitise and strip sensitive customer or corporate data before it is ever sent to an external Large Language Model (LLM). This shields your organisation from data leaks and compliance breaches.

This means you get the agility of generative AI backed by enterprise-grade, auditable, secure workflows: the kind of governance IT teams look for.

Own Your Digital Destination

The future of digital experience is being built on open-source, model-agnostic foundations. By giving your marketing team visual page building, centralised brand context, and performance-driven optimisation within an enterprise-grade secure environment, Drupal AI is paving the way for digital teams to operate at maximum velocity with zero brand risk.

The future of open-source digital experience is being built right now. If your digital product or content marketing teams are ready to experience what is possible today, explore our progress and try the live demo.

Author: Will Huggins

In 2025, the Drupal AI Initiative launched with a clear vision: to establish Drupal as the premier open-source AI platform for digital experiences.

One year later, the market momentum is clear. What began as a highly focused working group has grown into a powerful ecosystem supported by 32 global partner organisations, over 50 active contributors, and over $1.5 million in committed funding. Most importantly, with the core AI technology now clocking up over 18,000 installs, organisations are actively building their next-generation marketing engines on Drupal.

For digital teams, AI presents a host of opportunities. The power to increase speed of production on one hand, while maintaining quality, consistency and governance on the other. Drupal is addressing this head-on by creating two dedicated product workstreams: Inside AI and Outside AI.

This blog post outlines what this means for your digital roadmap and how Drupal can help your digital marketing operations win in the age of AI.

"Inside AI" vs. "Outside AI"

As AI has evolved from chat boxes into autonomous, multi-step agents, digital leaders need a platform that does two things simultaneously: empowers human creators inside the browser and securely integrates with external marketing systems.

To accelerate our product roadmap, we have divided our day-to-day development into two specialised, business-focused tracks:

1. Inside AI

• The Core Value: Empowering your marketing and content teams.
• The Focus: This stream focuses on the tools built directly into the editorial interface to supercharge you digital experiences and campaign execution. It drives our visual page-building tools, in-product copy editors, translation modules, and the Context Control Center (CCC).
• The Goal: To eliminate the repetitive tasks and developer bottlenecks that slow down your marketing queue. Your team can take a campaign brief, generate a brand-consistent landing page, optimise it for SEO, and localise it for global audiences in seconds, all while keeping humans firmly in the loop to make the final publishing decisions.

2. Outside AI

• The Core Value: Make it easy for site builders and developers to use coding agents to build, interact with and migrate to Drupal.
• The Focus: This stream ensures that Drupal serves as a highly governed, secure production platform for websites, marketing systems, automation platforms (such as n8n or Activepieces), and external AI agents.
• The Goal: To position Drupal as the most reliable, secure, and structured backend for your wider digital stack. We are making it incredibly easy for external systems and autonomous agents to build and deploy using Drupal without introducing security, compliance, or governance risks.

Through this dual focus, we aim to make Drupal the most advanced, intuitive workspace for your marketing teams and content creators, as well as the most secure and connectable platform to build on.

What is Ready Now?

As you plan your digital product roadmaps and marketing strategies, here is a summary of exactly what is production-ready, what is ready for pilot testing, and what is on the horizon:

Live and Ready

These capabilities are fully stable, secure, and ready to drive immediate ROI in your production environments:

• Freedom of AI Choice: Drupal connects seamlessly with over 87 AI providers (including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure and Amazee.ai). You can swap models behind the scenes to optimise for cost, performance, or geographic data residency rules without rewriting any code.
• Creative & Editorial Assistants: Bounded, human-in-the-loop features like automated image alt-text generation, metadata auto-tagging, and initial copy drafting are ready to go. They act as immediate, built-in time savers for your editorial teams.
• AI Automators: Automate time consuming content management tasks like re-tagging all your content or turning PDF or word documents into accessible HTML pages - AI Automators are your CMS superpower!
• Brand & Data Guardrails: Advanced security filters that automatically sanitise sensitive customer data before it ever leaves for an external LLM, while validating incoming AI responses to ensure compliance and prevent "hallucinations" on your live site.

Ready for Beta Testing

These features are highly advanced and close to general availability. They are perfect for controlled pilot programs to gain a competitive edge:

• The Context Control Center (CCC): The brain of your brand. The CCC is a centralised space where you can define your brand voice, editorial style guides, target audience personas, and domain knowledge. This ensures that any AI-generated layout or copy sounds like your brand, rather than generic web text.
• Automated Translation & Multi-Step Campaigns: Workflows that automatically translate entire content libraries or combine multiple AI steps to generate structured assets while capturing local nuances and brand tone.
• Conversational Site Building: Tools that allow digital product owners and site builders to configure and lay out basic Drupal structures using natural language, drastically reducing initial setup times.
• Cost & Performance Tracking: Fully integrated with standard enterprise monitoring tools. You can track exact token usage, model costs, and AI activity in real time, protecting your marketing budget from unexpected bills.

Coming Soon

One of the cutting-edge, experimental capabilities currently being refined in sandbox environments is Fully Autonomous Agents. These background agents are designed to analyse website performance, automatically propose layout optimisations to boost conversions, or build complex database queries entirely on their own.

Control and Governance

As a mature open-source platform, Drupal AI is structurally sovereign, model-agnostic, and transparently governed.
Whether you need to host open-source models locally to comply with strict regional privacy regulations or plug into the latest commercial LLMs for maximum speed, Drupal AI ensures you always own your data, your models, and your digital roadmap. We build trust directly into the architecture through branch-based content versioning, strict governance workflows, and deep audit trails.

Accelerate Your Roadmap

The Drupal AI Initiative is driving the future of open-source digital experience. If your marketing or digital product teams are ready to leverage the power of collaborative AI, try Drupal today.