Open source software runs a huge chunk of the geospatial world — but somebody still has to pay for it.
In this episode I sit down with Marco Bernasocchi, creator of QField and CEO of OpenGIS.ch, to dig into the awkward question most open source projects avoid: how do you keep something free and open while paying real people to build and maintain it?
Marco has been in the open source world since 2007, and he’s grown QField into a tool with over two million downloads and a team of 14 behind it. We talk through how the money actually works — from sponsored feature development, to donations, to the cloud service that now funds most of what they do. Marco makes a compelling case that the real product isn’t the software at all; it’s convenience. You can always run it yourself. Paying just makes life easier — and keeps the project alive for everyone who can’t.
We also get into why he refuses to say “free software,” what maintainer burnout really looks like, and his advice for any developer quietly drowning in a project they love but can’t afford to keep running.
A candid conversation about money, sustainability, and being a good citizen in the open source ecosystem.
In Conversation
Meet Marco Bernasocchi and QField
Daniel: Marco, welcome to the podcast. I work with you — I’m the community manager for QField and OpenGIS.ch — but that’s not why you’re here today. Give listeners a sense of who you are and what QField is, and then let’s get into who actually pays the bills.
Marco: Thanks, Daniel. This is a subject that’s very dear to me — I’ve spoken about it at FOSS4G and gave a keynote on it at FOSDEM. Open source is fantastic, but we all need to pay our employees. You wouldn’t be happy if I sent you source code as a salary.
Marco: I created QField in 2013 by taking what was then still Quantum GIS and getting it running on Android. I showed it to one of my professors at a conference, and he told me to keep going. Not long after, I started a company with Matthias — OpenGIS.ch. We’re now 40 people working on QGIS and QField. Matthias became CTO, so he doesn’t code much anymore, and today we have a dedicated team of 14 building QField. Beyond that, I chair the QGIS Foundation and sit on the OSGeo board.
The Scale of QField’s Reach
Daniel: How big is QField, actually? Give us some numbers.
Marco: I’ll give you mostly Android numbers, since that’s the platform we’ve tracked the longest — around 1.7 million installs through the Play Store, with roughly half a million active users a month, meaning people who open QField at least once. On the cloud side we’re at about 70,000 accounts, with a free tier everyone can use. Add iOS and you’re probably close to two million downloads total. Then there’s Windows, Linux, macOS — plain downloads from GitHub that we simply can’t track.
Daniel: Of those 70,000 cloud accounts, how many are free versus paid?
Marco: Maybe 70% free. We’re actually starting to clean that up now, checking in with people who aren’t using their accounts anymore. The first two years of QField Cloud were free for everyone, because we were in beta and stress-testing it — we never promised it would stay free forever.
Marco: This isn’t some random project on GitHub. Look at our success stories — the whole country of Finland manages its national data production with QGIS on the desktop and QField in the field, including disaster response. In New Zealand, NGOs are managing 20,000 devices out in the field to help eradicate predators. We recently found out the Norwegian Research Institute is doing incredible biology fieldwork with QField — and we only discovered it because it turned up in the news.
The Day an Avalanche Took Down the Data Center
Daniel: This sounds like a uniquely Swiss problem — having your data center taken out by an avalanche.
Marco: Sustainability was the highest priority when we chose our data center, and it still is. The one we use, Data Center Lite, is a repurposed early-1900s textile factory — reused hardware, hydropower, extremely strong on sustainability. It sits in the mountains near my town. We liked that it was local and small, maybe slightly too small for what we eventually needed. Our team manages that cloud platform and keeps it running — including the day we got a message saying the data center had lost power because an avalanche had buried the diesel backups. That actually happened, on the very day we came out of beta. Two years of nothing going wrong, and then that. We eventually moved to a data center with a redundant location. But QField itself is still built offline-first — the cloud is a commodity that makes life easier, not a requirement.
The Three Ways Open Source Projects Make Money
Daniel: So who pays the bills?
Marco: There are really three ways money comes into a project like this. The first is sponsored feature development — someone needs a specific capability, like when the Finnish administration needed CAD/topology functionality, so they sponsored it. That was how we financed QField early on. The second is donations — charity, sustaining memberships, sponsorships. QGIS runs mostly on sustaining memberships, where you pay to become a member of the QGIS Association and the only benefit is your logo on the website. The third, and now the biggest for us, is software-as-a-service — QField Cloud. Two years ago, feature development was most of our income. Now it’s shifted to about 20% feature development, with the rest coming from the cloud subscription.
Marco: Donations and sponsored features both come with a lot of stress — you’re waiting for someone to give, or chasing down two or three organizations to co-fund a feature, which makes you a project manager as much as a developer. The SaaS model is completely different: I know roughly how much revenue is coming in each month, and that lets me actually plan — hire staff, budget for a DevOps role once we hit enough subscribers, instead of hunting for the next contract just to make payroll.
Why Marco Refuses to Say “Free Software”
Daniel: You talk about open source, not free software. Was that mindset shift difficult?
Marco: Not for me — I’ve always been skeptical of the naming, not the substance. I respect what the Free Software Foundation built philosophically, the GPL and everything it represents. But calling it “free software” instead of “freedom software” means most people hear “free of charge.” I’ve been using open source tooling since 2007, when I got frustrated with how Windows made you hunt down and install everything yourself instead of using a package manager, and switched to Ubuntu. Back then, “free” mattered because the tools weren’t as good as the paid alternatives — QGIS 1.7 was nowhere near ArcGIS. Now, with QGIS 3.44 or 4.0, that gap has closed, and in some areas QGIS is actually ahead. So the “it’s free” argument has fallen way down the list of reasons to use it. What matters far more is the side effect of building something in the open — a company shooting a marketing video for a transatlantic cable install can casually show someone using QGIS in the footage, and never think to sponsor the project that made that possible.
Monetizing Convenience, Not Freedom
Daniel: So how do you actually get people comfortable paying?
Marco: The key line from my FOSDEM keynote is that we monetize convenience, not freedom. You can always run QField Cloud yourself — it’s open source too. But most people would rather pay roughly 15 to 17 euros a month than run their own hosting operation on hope and hope it doesn’t fall over. That’s the difference — I have two to three people whose actual job is making sure it doesn’t fall over. Paying for that convenience is the easiest way for someone to support the project, and it means I know what’s coming in every month.
Being a Good Citizen — Giving Back to QGIS
Daniel: Doesn’t the plugin system also get you off the hook a bit? Someone wants something very specific, and you can point them elsewhere instead of bloating QField’s core.
Marco: Exactly — and it lets the project grow without us having to accept everything. But there’s another side to this. When we build something with value beyond just our own cloud users, we put it in QGIS instead of locking it behind our product. We built a plugin that converts QGIS projects into QField-ready forms. We could have kept that inside QField Cloud only, forcing you to upload your project to convert it. Instead we built it as a free QGIS plugin, because that’s where it generates the most value for people, whether or not they ever use QField Cloud. QField is an upstream project of QGIS, and we try to be the best possible citizen in that ecosystem — put things where they create the most value, even when that place isn’t our own product.
Marco: I call it being a bit of Robin Hood — not stealing, but making sure the people who can afford to support the tooling they depend on actually do, so it stays free for the people who can’t. If you’re a business built on top of QGIS or QField and you’re not supporting it, the worst outcome isn’t abstract — it’s that the tool disappears, and your business has to rebuild on something else or vanishes with it.
Advice for Burnt-Out Maintainers
Daniel: Say I’m a maintainer — a decent community around my project, some businesses quietly depending on it, and I’m burning out. I don’t like asking people for money. What do I do?
Marco: The first thing is getting other people involved — that’s exactly what made QGIS and QField scale. Gary Sherman started QGIS, but the reason it took off is that he got people smarter than him involved early, and I did the same with QField. One person asking for money doesn’t carry the same trust as a community does. A community is the first sign that a project is worth funding.
Marco: But it also has to be an honest decision. If you’re fine keeping it a hobby forever, that’s completely valid — just don’t let yourself feel pressured into treating a hobby like a job while getting none of the benefits of either. Maintainer burnout is a real, named problem, because people feel responsible for something they built and can’t let go of. At some point you have to be honest with yourself: is this still something that gives me pleasure, or have I quietly turned it into unpaid work? If it’s the second one, it’s okay to ask for money. I was lucky — I’m not actually a software engineer by training, I come from a geography background, and I was always more comfortable talking to people about money than writing code. Now that I have 40 people depending on me, and something like 60 kids indirectly depending on those salaries, there’s nothing shameful about asking the people who can pay to pay.
Daniel: I went through a version of that myself — passion projects that quietly turned into jobs without the paycheck. With this podcast, I made a deliberate decision early on: if it couldn’t make money, I wasn’t doing it, because I already have enough hobbies. I asked my first guest for $100, and they said yes — that was the signal I needed. It barely covered the editing time, but I knew that guest was reaching a bigger audience through the podcast than through their own blog or social channels, so it felt fair.
Marco: And that’s it exactly. It’s fine to decide something is a hobby — just be honest about which one it actually is, because if you let maintainer pressure turn a hobby into an obligation, that’s what eventually kills the project.
