Hello everyone!

When Immich originally joined FUTO two years ago, the news was received with a healthy level of skepticism. Who was FUTO? Why did they want to "acquire" Immich? Did this mean the beginning of the end for the product? Well, it's been almost two years now and we thought it would be fun to have a little retrospective on how things have played out since then.

To begin, let's review the original list of commitments that were made when Immich became part of FUTO:

• Pay the core team to work on Immich full-time
• Maintain full autonomy over the project's direction and leadership
• Continue to license Immich under AGPL
• Keep Immich's development direction with no paywalled features
• Keep Immich "built for the people" (no ads, data mining/selling, or alternative motives)
• Back the project with financial, technical, legal, and administrative support

Pay the core team to work on Immich full-time

On May 1st, 2024 three members of the core team came on full time. Since then, the paid team and scope has expanded to ~10 people, located all around the world, and we continue to grow. As previously announced, we're also working on an encrypted backup product, which is something the team is very excited about. Also, last summer (2025) Immich had its first intern, Brandon, which was super awesome and something we are doing again this year. As an intern he implemented a lot of exciting features, including:

• Chromecast support
• Mobile widgets
• A new editor

Let us keep full autonomy about the project's direction and leadership

Yep, Alex continues to be the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) of the project.

It's pretty normal to think that the project governance might have changed when Immich joined FUTO. However, it has stayed pretty much exactly the same. Alex still has the final say in important decisions, like how to implement the option to purchase Immich, what features to work on and prioritize, and any controversial design changes in the application. Also, since joining FUTO we have checked off a ton of items from our roadmap. So, two years later, Immich continues to move forward, and in a good direction.

Continue to license Immich under AGPL

Yep, it is still the same license.

The project and associated code remains available on GitHub under the terms of AGPL.

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View license

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Keep Immich's development direction with no paywalled features

Yep, there are still no features that require payment.

Product keys

When it comes to monetization there are lots of options, most of which are not great for the end user. We decided to go with the approach of selling product keys. In short, we ask users to pay for the software, especially if they find it useful. We launched product keys a few months after joining FUTO and have seen a lot of success with it so far. If you would like to support us, considering buying a product key here.

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Buy Immich

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Tile server

More than just not requiring payment, we've also been running some services for the community, for free. Most notably is https://tiles.immich.cloud/, our tile server which handles tens of millions of requests each month.

Delivered features

Since joining FUTO we've been able to deliver a ton of features. Some of the bigger ones include:

• Email notifications
• Read/write external libraries
• Translate the web app into other languages
• Folders view
• Tags
• Private/locked photos
• Google Cast support
• Scoped API keys
• Optical character recognition (OCR)
• Free up space on mobile
• Better background backups (especially on iOS)
• Granular API permissions
• Search improvements
• Large file utility
• GPS utility
• HDR videos
• Custom shared link urls
• Content Security Policy
• Stable release
• and many more…

Keep Immich "built for the people" (no ads, data mining/selling, or alternative motives)

Yep, there continue to be no ads, data mining/selling, or alternative motives.

Since coming on board, we've actually been able to add a privacy onboarding card, which makes it easier to see what features rely on external services and how to disable them.

Provide us with financial, technical, legal, and administrative support

Besides paying our salaries, being part of FUTO has meant we've been able to:

• Travel to various tech conferences, including:
  • Don't Be Evil (FUTO's conference during SXSW)
  • FOSDEM in both 2025 and 2026
• Donate to projects that Immich relies on, such as libvips, exiftool, ffmpeg, and many more
• Launch our merch store
• Secure trademarks for the Immich brand and successfully enforced them
• Get dedicated help with hiring (screening, interviewing, and onboarding new employees)
• Receive guidance and expertise regarding marketing and public relations
• Produce video and written content about Immich and the team
• Build infrastructure for collecting payments
• Handle customer support issues related to payments

Being part of FUTO has given us a lot of support, especially in areas outside of product development, which has left the team with more time to focus on building what matters most: an awesome product.

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View trademark

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Community concerns

It's worth mentioning that in response to the original announcement, which was also posted in Discord, Reddit, and GitHub, many of you wrote comments expressing additional concerns. Some of the common areas included doubts that:

• The product would get worse
• Immich would become a paid product
• An unsustainable business model would lead to other poor outcomes
• The developers would get pulled into other projects
• FUTO would fork the project and change the license
• FUTO is relatively new and doesn't have an established track record

As far as we can tell none of these concerns have really panned out. We think most people would agree that Immich is in a much better place than it was 2 years ago. The product is better, the team is bigger, and the future looks brighter.

Building trust

At the end of the day, this is all about trust. Unfortunately, technology companies have generally shown patterns of making choices and decisions that erode, instead of build it. At FUTO, we want to earn trust and establish a track record of building software that respects and prioritizes users and their privacy.

We hope that we have been able to earn your trust over the last two years. We are committed to building awesome products that delight users. We have no hidden agenda. We have no exit plan. Our primary goal and focus has and always will be building awesome software in a sustainable way.

Cheers,
The Immich Team