Tor just raised $200,000 to keep private browsing alive — here’s who got the money

The Tor Project just finished its first community funding round, and it worked out better than a lot of people were betting on. More than $200,000 came in, and $174,536 of that went straight to the small projects building the tools people rely on to stay private online.

To keep things in perspective, this amount didn’t come from a handful of people with deep pockets. Instead, it came from ordinary people who pitched in with their own money to support the work of the Tor Project. About 580 people made 662 donations, and the average gift was only $41. So this was mostly regular users tossing in whatever they could spare, which is the same crowd that pays attention to which privacy browsers are actually worth using.

The blog post explains that the reason for this was that money got shaky.

A policy change back in 2025 cut off funding that a bunch of these tools had counted on for years, and some even had grants yanked mid-contract. Tor was pretty blunt about the danger there, saying that “when public-interest infrastructure depends too heavily on one funder, a single decision can put essential work at risk.”

Alright, so who actually took home the biggest chunk?

That would be Onion Browser, the app that gets iPhone and iPad users onto Tor. It pulled in $111,119, which is miles ahead of everyone else. Tor figures a big reason was plain name recognition, plus the fundraiser being shown right inside Tor Browser where people couldn’t miss it. Visibility clearly counts for a lot, and it comes at a time when Tor Browser is moving onto a newer Firefox base for its next big release.

That said, the allocation of funds drops off pretty quickly from there. Unredacted got $40,729, and a project called Osservatorio Nessuno landed $14,633. The rest of the group, including OONI, SecureDrop, and OnionShare, each walked away with $5,000.

The post also sheds light on the fact that the donations themselves came in as crypto. Most of which was Bitcoin and Monero, with a bit of Ethereum and Zcash thrown in. Funny enough, the Monero money never showed up on the public tracker but still made up roughly a quarter of everything raised.

If any of this has you thinking about your own setup, keep in mind that browsers don’t all protect you equally, which is something a recent privacy test covering every major browser laid out pretty clearly.

This round is over, but Tor says people can still donate to the projects directly.

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