Hi folks! To create more transparency, we wanted to share a quick update on how the business side of Street Art Cities is doing.
Whilst we predominantly are an open community, there is also a business side to this platform. We need to make some money to keep servers running, pay staff, and keep building out the technical functionality of the platform.
Relation to the community
We see the business as the facilitator that enables the community to grow and thrive. We do this by offering additional services around the content the community manages.
The business has two main stakeholders:
- The community of artists, hunters and visitors
- Municipalities who we provide paid services to, in order to support the community
Core team setup
The core team, which runs the business and supports the community, currently consists of 4 part-time members:
- Bart (@Bart) - partnerships, finance, grants, sales and strategy
- Tim (@Streetartwerpenaar) - community management, content, social media and partnerships
- Thomas (@Thomas) - technology, sales, support
- Noa (@Noa_Heutz) - technology, social media
We aim to keep the core team as small as possible to lower costs, whilst also making sure we have enough capacity to support the growing community.
Revenue streams and expenses
Our revenue consists of the following sources:
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Official partnerships with municipalities
- Municipalities pay SAC a yearly fee to become an official partner. We promote these cities on our website and in our app, and offer them consultancy services to make the most of their street art strategy. They also get access to a dashboard where they can measure the impact of street art cities in their town, and access our network of verified artists.
- Status: as of January 2026, we have 12 partner cities, some of which are on multi-year payment cycles, and others are on legacy ‘lifetime’ partnership plans. In 2025, this brought in around €12,000.
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Supporters (app subscriptions)
- Our supporters are another important funding source for the platform. Users can become supports though monthly subscriptions in the iPhone or Android app, or through monthly or one-off payments on our website.
- Status: in 2025, we revamped our supporters tier and its benefits for users, as well as adding the ability to become a supporter through our website. Currently, there are around 300 monthly supporters. In 2025, this brought in around €10,000.
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Government grants and one-off projects
- As an art platform, we occasionally will work with partners to run grant-funded projects. We aim to focus on projects that help develop tools and functionality for our grant partners, whilst also providing long-term value for the Street Art Cities platform itself.
- Status: in 2025, we had a particularly bad year in terms of grants. Although we spent a lot of time writing grant proposals for several national and EU grants with our partners, we did not get awarded any of these grants. We’re hoping to have better luck with this in 2026!
Our expenses can be broken down in these main categories:
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Development and platform hosting
- We spend around €1,200 per month on the hosting of the platform (servers, email sending, content delivery) and related software subscriptions (email marketing, issue tracking, code storage). In addition, we pay the developers in our core team a small fee for their time.
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Staff and other operating costs
- Our other core team members also get paid a small monthly fee for their time. Other expenses include insurance, accountants and travel.
Overall company health
As you can see, Street Art Cities does not currently generate any significant revenue. Whilst through multi-year grants and personal investments we can keep the business running smoothly, we want to focus on expanding the listed income streams in 2026, so that we can continue to run the platform in a stable way, especially in light of a growing community and rising hosting costs.
We’ve been setting up a more sophisticated sales process for selling our official partnerships to municipalities (including writing a whitepaper and doing more outbound outreach), and will continue those efforts in the coming months.
So, overall, we’re doing okay, but if you want to help maintain the platform, becoming a supporter is a great way to help us!