Tor Project funding explained: who pays for the anonymity network
Tor costs nothing to download, but the network behind it is not free to run. Relays burn electricity and bandwidth, developers draw salaries, and security audits cost money. The organization that coordinates the software, the Tor Project, Inc., is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it publishes its books for anyone to inspect: audited financial statements, annual reports and IRS Form 990 filings from 2007 through 2024 sit on its reports page.
A government-built origin
Tor began at the US Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s, where researchers David Goldschlag, Mike Reed and Paul Syverson designed onion routing to shield government communications from metadata surveillance. As Ben Collier recounts in an MIT Press Reader essay drawn from his book on Tor, the design had a built-in social consequence: it only works if ordinary people use it too, because anonymity depends on the size of the crowd. That logic pulled in cypherpunk volunteers, eventually produced an independent nonprofit, and left the funding question permanently awkward. Governments are increasingly clamping down on the internet, yet the technologies to circumvent these blocks are readily available (and, in the case of Tor, completely free) and often funded, developed, used, and promoted by the same governments.
The dependence was once extreme. Figures compiled from Tor's own filings by ZDNet in 2018 show US government sources supplying roughly 85 percent of funding in 2015, 76 percent in 2016 and 51 percent in 2017, when total revenue hit a then-record 4.2 million dollars. The 2017 funder list reads like a Washington directory: Radio Free Asia gave 798,029 dollars, SRI International 635,504, the National Science Foundation 548,151, the Swedish agency Sida 594,408 and the State Department 133,061. What the recent reports show
The latest published figures show the same dependence in slower decline. For fiscal year 2021-2022 the project reported 6.95 million dollars in audited revenue, 53.5 percent of it from the US government on its 990, led by a 2,246,302-dollar award from the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Its transparency post also lists 152,906 dollars from the Open Technology Fund, a program backed by the US Agency for Global Media, for onion services serving USAGM-funded media outlets. Two years later, the 2023-2024 financials put US government money at 35.08 percent of roughly 8 million dollars in revenue, still the largest single block. Foundation and corporate money has grown into the second pillar. Mozilla gave the project 24,500 dollars in 2016 and 522,188 dollars in 2017, with DuckDuckGo adding 25,000 that year, according to the ZDNet report. In the 2023-2024 books, foundations supplied 18.67 percent of revenue, including unrestricted grants from the Ford Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the #StartSmall fund, while corporations and nonprofits together contributed 21.59 percent, a 68 percent jump over the prior year. The Zcash Community Grants program specifically funds Arti, Tor's Rust-based rewrite. Small donors, unrestricted money
Individual donations are modest per person but strategically prized because they arrive without strings attached. User donations hit a record 425,709 dollars in 2017; by fiscal 2021-2022 the line had grown to 1,707,263 dollars, 28.5 percent of revenue, before settling at 1,102,619 dollars, or 15.61 percent, in 2023-2024. In August 2026 the project reported the results of its first participatory funding round: 580 unique donors made 662 contributions averaging 41 dollars, with roughly half the value arriving in bitcoin and about a quarter in Monero. The irony debate
The tension in all of this is hard to miss, and critics have leaned on it for years: the tool of choice for evading surveillance is built on the taxpayer's dime. The BBC put the paradox to co-founder Roger Dingledine in 2017, citing leaked NSA documents that included the "Tor Stinks" assessment alongside the several million dollars the US government had donated since the 1990s. Dingledine's answer was that the government's interests are not monolithic: "A lot of the US government funding for internet freedom tools comes from Republicans." The project's own filings point the same way. The State Department money exists precisely because censorship circumvention serves US foreign policy goals, alongside the activists it serves. Funding concentration also decided what got built. Restricted grants are earmarked: the DARPA- and Georgetown-backed RACECAR research, the Zcash money behind Arti, Open Society Foundation support for bridge distribution. Unrestricted donations, the project argues, are what let it respond quickly when censorship emergencies hit. Its 2021-2022 post noted that 82 percent of expenses went to program services, 10 percent to administration and 8 percent to fundraising, a budget Dingledine once described as modest "considering the number of people involved." The pressure years
Recent years have tested that model. The 2023-2024 books closed with a small deficit on a 990 basis, about 56,000 dollars between 7,287,566 dollars of revenue and 7,343,602 dollars of expenses. Then came what the project's August 2026 post calls a major policy shift in 2025 that disrupted internet-freedom funding, with some grantees reporting contracts rescinded mid-term. One response has been to diversify how money is raised, not just who sends it: the participatory round raised just over 201,000 dollars for ten community projects, matched by crypto-industry funders including Zcash Community Grants, Cake Wallet and the Ethereum Foundation. As the post puts it, "a single decision can put essential work at risk" when public-interest infrastructure relies on one funder. None of this changes what Tor costs its users, which is nothing, but it does shape the network everyone depends on. Supporting it does not require a grant writer: running a relay remains the most direct individual contribution there is, and our guide to the basics of running a relay explains what that actually involves.
