Radical transparency

What it costs us to make

Posters are free for everyone, forever. Songs are the thank-you for keeping it that way.

A shop has to hide its costs. A nonprofit does not. Every figure on this page is read out of the code that actually spends the money, and every one says where it came from. Where we do not have a number yet, this page says so rather than invent one.

Where the money comes from, and where it goes

This is the organization's own money, which is a different question from what one poster costs to make. When a funder, a state registry or a reviewer asks for our financials, this is what they mean. The identifiers and dates below are exact. Every figure we cannot yet report from filed, reconciled books is marked as not published rather than estimated.

The organization

Revenue by source

Measured One real bound, from a filing rather than from us: KEEP CALM INC filed the Form 990-N for fiscal 2025 and the IRS accepted it. The IRS only accepts a 990-N from an organization whose gross receipts are normally $50,000 a year or less, so that is the ceiling the year sat under. A 990-N carries no schedules and no breakdown, which is exactly why the table above exists and why it is not filled from it.

What we spent it on

Cash, liabilities and staff

Filings, and what to expect next

• KEEP CALM INC files the Form 990-N, the electronic notice the IRS requires of exempt organizations whose gross receipts are normally $50,000 a year or less. The 2025 return was filed and accepted. A 990-N is a notice, not a return with schedules: there is no financial statement inside it to link to, which is the honest reason there is no Form 990 PDF on this page yet. Verify the organization and its filing history at the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search using EIN 33-2117386.
• The next return is due May 15, 2027, covering the fiscal year that ends December 31, 2026. If gross receipts pass the $50,000 threshold in a year, the organization becomes a full Form 990 or 990-EZ filer and that return, which does carry the full financial schedules, will be linked here.
• The first annual report covers fiscal 2026 and is published with the return for that year, which is due May 15, 2027.

Who watches the money, and who to ask

KEEP CALM INC is governed by a board of directors, as a California nonprofit public benefit corporation must be. The board approves the annual budget, reviews spending against it, and approves the annual filing before it goes to the IRS. The President is the principal officer and signs the filings. Hawa Naataa is the Treasurer. The other directors are Rudy Gallegos and Alfred Carnes, who have each agreed to serve and whose job is to hold the Treasurer and the President accountable for the figures on this page.

Any question about the figures on this page goes to Contact@KeepCalm.org and gets a real answer. If you are a funder who needs something in a particular format, ask: it is faster than guessing what you need.

What one thing costs to make

Everything from here down is unit economics: what a single song, poster, video or shirt costs this organization. It sits underneath the figures above because it answers a different question, and it stays because almost nobody publishes it.

Why songs are counted and posters are not

Start with the honest part: both of them cost us real money. Anyone who tells you a poster is free to make is rounding in their own favor.

The difference is what the money buys. A song is sung by an outside vendor, one render per song, billed to us the moment it is made and whether or not anybody ever plays it. A poster's cost is mostly translation: we pay once to put its words into every language we publish, and then that one poster serves every reader on the wall, in all of those languages, for as long as the site exists.

So a song costs about two and a half times what a poster costs, and that cost is spent again for every single song. A poster's cost is mostly a one-time translation that then serves every reader of that phrase, in every language, forever. The poster is the help, and the help does not get a price tag. That is the whole argument, and the numbers below are the proof.

What one creation costs

One detail worth knowing, because it is the reason the poster bill never falls: every tip we write is unique on purpose, so no translation we buy can ever be reused for another poster. We pay for all 35 translated languages, on every single poster, every time.

What a shirt costs

Nothing in the shop is priced by feel. One function does all of it: take what the printer actually charges us for that exact item and size, double it, then round up to the next price ending in .99. That is the entire pricing policy, and it is four lines long in lib/merch.js.

One assumption The card fee is the only number on this page we do not read from a vendor. It is the published US online card rate, 2.9% plus 30 cents, and lib/bundle.js labels it an assumption rather than burying it inside a formula. If your card costs us more than that, the last column is smaller than it says.

Read the last column carefully, because it is not profit. "KEEP CALM keeps" is what is left after the printer and the card, and before shipping, hosting, storage, and every hour of human work. No figure on this page claims to cover a salary.

What a discount really costs us

The Calm Set is a tee, its matching print, and a wallpaper pack. Bought separately those come to $58.98. As a set they are $49.99, so you save $8.99, about 15%.

Here is the part a shop would not show you. The printer still charges us $28.97 and the card still takes $1.75, so we keep $19.27, which is 39% of the price instead of the 47% we keep on the tee alone. The discount comes out of our side, not the printer's. That is what a discount is, and it is fine, but it should not be a secret.

The wallpaper pack in that set is listed at zero dollars, because it costs zero dollars: it is rendered, not printed. Giving it an invented sticker price to make the savings look bigger is the oldest trick in the bundle trade, and we are not running it on a nonprofit's checkout.

Measured Every number in this section comes from lib/bundle.js, whose own test suite checks the arithmetic.

What we do not know, and will not guess

• How many free songs a month a free account gets. It is not decided, it will never be zero, and we would rather leave a blank here than print a number we have to take back.
• Shipping. The printer sets it per destination, and it is in none of the figures above.
• Hosting, storage, bandwidth, the crisis pages, and human time. None of it is in any number on this page. A tier that implied one shirt runs the organization would be a lie you could check.
• What these things will cost next year. Printers change their base costs and vendors change their rates. Each number here carries the date we read it, so you can tell when we are overdue for another look.

If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong in public, and you can hold us to it: Contact@KeepCalm.org. The promise these numbers pay for is written out in the Free Help Guarantee, and if you want to keep it funded you can give the gift of calm.