Even without building anything new in Tails, publishing our **releases** every 6 weeks is a lot of work as it also implies fixing the problems found in previous versions, documenting the changes, migrating to newer versions of Debian, GNOME, and Tor Browser, and making sure that the **foundations** of Tails stay relevant. As the schedule of emergency releases is unpredictable, they are hard to fund through grants and we instead usually rely on donations.
Developing **new features** is not the biggest share of our budget. They are almost exclusively covered by grants or developed by volunteers. Since 2015, new features that were not funded by grants included:
Our **help desk** is helping hundreds of Tails users each month. Each user request costs us 6€ on average to proceed. In 2016 our help desk was paid entirely out of donations.
Organizing our own **meetings** and attending conferences in our field is critical to keep our community alive and relevant. But this is usually hard to get funded by grants, so donations help us a lot here.Since 2015, we attended more than 15 international conferences on free software (DebConf), Internet freedom (IFF), hacking (32C3), human rights (RightsCon), and journalism (Logan CIJ). And organized more than 10 internal in-person meetings and development sprints.
In 2015, we worked a lot on **infrastructure**, for example to write an automated test suite to verify continuously the well-functioning of our ISO images, to automate the build of development ISO images for testing, etc. This work is invisible to the user but, for example, makes it much faster to publish emergency releases when we discover serious bugs.
