News

Over the past few years, we have frequently heard from Calyx Internet Members that they would like a 'bring your own device (BYOD)' option. Achieving this goal has taken a lot of coordination between Calyx and our partners, Mobile Citizen and T-Mobile, but we have finally arrived. We are excited to announce the launch of our new Sprout membership level! Sprout members will be able to use their own devices that are compatible with a Calyx SIM for unlimited internet data during their membership. Choosing your own device opens the door to options far beyond the range of hotspots we have been able to offer. You can pick a device that meets your particular budget, needs, and concerns. For example, you can get a device designed specifically for a RV lifestyle with advanced capabilities like external antenna ports, built-in ethernet ports, easy-to-use native VPN functionality, and more. To check if your device is compatible, you can enter your device IMEI number in this lookup provided by T-mobile.

As always, we want to make sure all Calyx Internet members have the option to adjust their membership to their needs. From now through October 2025, if you want to switch your current Contributor, Contributor Plus, or Sustainer level to the Sprout level for the remainder of your active membership, you can take the following steps:

1. verify if your device is compatible with the Sprout SIM.
2. log in to your account
3. click Devices on the lefthand menu
4. click Order Replacement Device to order a BYOD SIM (no contribution needed)
5. click Profile on the lefthand menu
6. Update the Mailing Address to where you want the SIM card to ship to

This will ensure that you get the Sprout SIM card. If you run into any issues in the process, please contact us at help[at]calyxinstitute[dot]org.

Have more questions about the new Sprout membership and what it means to "Bring Your Own Device"? Please check out our Sprout membership FAQs.

Sign-ups for the Contributor Plus membership level are currently unavailable while we evaluate our current device selection and work on cultivating new membership levels like the Bring Your Own Device membership, which we plan to launch soon. Our apologies for any inconvenience! If you are not sure which of our current membership levels is right for you, please refer to our Membership Levels guide or reach out to our Membership team by email at help @ calyxinstitute.org.

GRANTING UPDATE:
Application has been closed. Applicants will be notified of funding decisions via email in April 2025. Find out more about this program on the grant page.

The Calyx Institute started providing small grants in 2020; seeds of hope to nourish individuals, small organizations, and collectives contributing to free and open-source software (FOSS) technologies and internet freedom. With the launch of our new initiative, the Sepal Fund, Calyx aims to reach even more people in our ecosystem, connecting them not only with financial resources, but with others doing complementary work.

Technologies are not built and distributed evenly. Platforms and their metaphorical enclosed gardens, built by tech giants, constantly reshape how we access communications, information, and knowledge. Government mass surveillance programs and invasive commercial data tracking profit from valuable personal data, leaving individual people subject to regular threats of data breach and abuse.

At the Calyx Institute, we envision a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected. That means supporting a privacy-respecting digital ecosystem fueled by FOSS, and communities working to protect and advance internet freedom and human rights. More importantly, we are committed to making sure the global majority and under-resourced people can equally afford and enjoy digital technologies without impediment, fear or hesitation.

Women and identity-diverse groups should be able to opt out from data tracking and profiling, by their phone makers and service providers, that could put them in danger. Residents in rural areas of America should be able to stay connected and engage meaningfully in the digital world. Survivors of natural disasters and crises should be able to contact their loved ones, despite infrastructural damage. Journalists and activists should be able to make safe, secure, and private communications to do their work. None of these are possible if we live in a one-dimensional, for-profit tech world. Sustaining and advancing an alternative tech future with an ecosystem of FOSS tools is more critical than ever. People's lives depend on it.

As we’ve reflected on the past four years of grantmaking experiences, along with the lived experiences of many on staff, Calyx’s philosophy on grantmaking has taken shape, encompassing the following principles:

• Community building. Too often, individuals, projects and organizations receiving funding from a shared funder are kept in silos from one another. By the nature of FOSS development, we understand how generative and necessary cross-pollination and collaboration is for sustainability. Undertaking the deep work of networking and community building among past, present and future Calyx grant recipients is core to our funding philosophy.
• Multi-Year commitment. Sustaining a tool is much more challenging than creating a tool, especially for less resourced projects and groups. More often than not, the funds needed to sustain a project, tool or program developed through seed funding is hard or impossible to come by. As a result, many innovative and game-changing ideas are left without care, leaving initial funding wasted and leading to reinventing the wheel. The newly launched Sepal Fund aims to change that pattern, by providing continuous funding for three consecutive years, thereby allowing for maintenance and planning.
• Unrestricted funding. Small organizations and collectives do not have the capacity to equip themselves with expertise in administration and operational work. Restricted grants without holistic support could disproportionately cost them energy and resources, leaving the core programmatic work hindered or even discarded, diminishing the effect of the funding. Calyx provides unrestricted funding to allow for projects and organizations to self-determine how resources would best serve their work.
• Eliminating barriers. Grant applications can often be burdensome and overly complex to small teams and projects. Calyx has streamlined and standardized our grant application to eliminate barriers in applying for much needed funding for small-but-mighty projects.
• Reciprocity. Too often, grant recipients are made to feel like supplicants, benefiting from the generosity of the grant makers. At Calyx, we believe that grant makers receive as much as grant recipients from the funding relationship.
• Sharing results. Calyx aims to compile and publish our learnings from the Sepal Fund pilot (2025-2027), so as to share knowledge and power across our digital privacy ecosystem.

We hope the Sepal Fund effort will sprout more growth in the whole ecosystem of FOSS technologies, and help to pollinate enlightenment across privacy and security advocates, internet freedom supporters, digital educators, and everyone for a privately, freely, and securely connected future.

Starting today, our CalyxOS Privacy Champion membership will come with the Pixel 8a as a membership premium! CalyxOS phone memberships are a great way to restore privacy for your mobile experience, as well as support our nonprofit mission to develop and distribute free online privacy tools. Plus, they make great gifts! To sign up or learn more, simply visit our member page.

As a new CalyxOS Privacy Champion, you will get a Pixel 8a pre-installed with CalyxOS as a thank-you gift. This Android operating system comes with default privacy-protecting settings, highly customizable control over personal data, and a full bundle of privacy-and-security-first apps.

The contribution required for this membership starts at $700 for the first year of membership. All of the contributions will go directly to maintaining and improving our tools to protect privacy and connectivity for everyone. If you would like to extend your support, please renew your membership with a $10 annual contribution after the first year.

With CalyxOS, you can make encrypted backups for your phone, secure communications with your contacts, control when and how your apps access the network, and more. We’re excited to pair these advances in our operating system with the Pixel 8a's improved hardware features, including Google's improved Tensor G3 chipset, which provides a significant upgrade in performance and processing speed from the Tensor G2 chipset in the Pixel 7a. CalyxOS will provide device support for this model at least through 2031, which means you can keep your phone for years without worrying about planned obsolescence or diminished performance. The 8a also features a long-lasting battery, a larger OLED display, smoother 120Hz refresh rate, and an aluminum frame with Gorilla Glass 3 upfront. Questions? You can get more details here.

Want to make your CalyxOS phone membership even more convenient? Combine it with our unlimited Wi-Fi hotspot membership! Our CalyxOS phone memberships comes without any Wi-Fi or data benefits, and can be used with any mobile data carrier.

Thank you for your membership and support,
The Calyx Institute

UPDATE: Application has been closed. Applicants will be notified of funding decisions via email in April 2025.

The Calyx Institute is excited to start the year of 2025 with the opening of the Sepal Fund, our multi-year grantmaking program for small organizations and collectives who are protecting internet freedom with research and tool building.

Since 2020, the Calyx Institute has been funding the development of digital privacy and security tools, research on mass surveillance systems, and training efforts to equip people with the knowledge and tools to protect their right to privacy and connectivity. In 2022, Calyx launched the Fusion Center Research Fund to aid investigations on law enforcement harvesting of personal data through intelligence-sharing centers. This effort, with nearly $200,000 disbursed to grantees, helped reveal the deleterious impact of surveillance technology on privacy and freedom of expression.

These efforts have led to the Sepal Fund, Calyx’s pilot program to build capacity within small groups with unrestricted and holistic grants. This program will provide five organizations, collectives, or projects a yearly grant of up to $50,000 for a total of three years. In addition, we will provide opportunities for professional development to our grantees, as well as other resources. With this funding opportunity, we hope to sustain and elevate research, tool development, and educational growth that harness the digital privacy ecosystem and defend internet freedom. With the blossoming of the Sepal Fund, Calyx will be even more committed to our mission and vision for a future of universally accessible digital privacy, security, and connectivity.

The application is open today through February 19 of 2025. Apply today! Find out more information about the Sepal Fund, including application requirements and program timeline on the grant page, or check our FAQ for any further questions.

You can also help us by spreading the word and let more people know the opportunity!

Happy holidays! Our office will be closed entirely on Dec. 25th and Jan 1 so our team can take time to celebrate this festive season with their families and friends. Our office will be open with limited hours and staff from Dec. 23-Jan 3, so please be patient with us while we work to respond to your inquiries during this time.

For general questions, check out our website's searchable Help section. For any technical problems with your Calyx hotspot, please give tech support a call at 877-216-9603 to troubleshoot your device and get started on a warranty replacement if necessary. We thank you for your patience and understanding, and wish you a Happy New Year!

As 2024 wraps up, have you thought about your plans in the coming year? At the Calyx Institute, we took a look back at our work in 2024, and are making new year’s resolutions to level up our privacy tool development and maintenance, deepen our community support with grantmaking, and provide our supporters with accessible resources to address their privacy needs.

The year 2024 saw both advances and challenges for digital privacy and internet freedom with AI and other emerging technologies on the rise. In the U.S., 19 states have passed comprehensive privacy laws, marking an effort to broaden and fortify rights to data privacy. Countries in both Asia and Latin America carried on with the trend to create data protection regulations highlighting AI governance, cybersecurity, biometric data collection, and cross-border data transfer. The European Union (EU) adopted the AI Act, the first comprehensive legal framework to regulate AI, aiming at furthering the protection of personal data that started with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws. Despite policy efforts, social media and platform companies are doubling down on massive surveillance with the aid of AI to sustain their data-harvesting business models. Billions of people suffered severe data breaches online, including their financial and health records.

All of these trends and emerging issues made our mission at the Calyx Institute more critical than ever: we will keep defending digital privacy, advancing connectivity, and striving for a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected.

In 2024, we expanded the depth of digital tool development around our flagship Android operating system, CalyxOS, while continuing our endeavor in bridging the digital divide with Calyx membership premiums’ hotspots.

This year, CalyxOS expanded to support 26 mobile device models. We successfully launched the CalyxOS version 6 based on Android 15 source code in October, simultaneous to the official Android 15 release. Throughout 2024, we started making CalyxOS available for more Pixel, Motorola, and Fairphone models while sustaining security updates for older models even if the manufacturers had ended their maintenance for these devices. We keep all security updates automatic over-the-air every month with full usability checks to minimize cyber attacks and elevate digital experience for people who are using CalyxOS. In addition, we are steadily and consistently revising and improving core features and services for everyday use, such as Setup Wizard, SeedVault for phone backups and restoration, Panic Button, Work Profile, and location service settings. Looking ahead, we are preparing to launch more CalyxOS features that are crucial to a wide range of use case scenarios so that people can have more flexibility to customize protection for their personal data based on their individual needs. Stay tuned for more news about CalyxOS!

As our Internet membership program continues to grow, we are proud to be facilitating more members than ever with our mobile Wi-Fi hotspot membership that enables them to get connected when they need it in places where connectivity resources are scarce. Our members’ generous contributions make all of Calyx’s work possible, and we are proud to show our thanks by helping bridge the digital divide, especially in moments when our members need it most. As Hinde, a longtime member from South Carolina, shared, “[Our Calyx] mifi device saved our bacon here in SC during Helene. Operated and connected flawlessly. … We were able to keep in touch with friends and family and relay messages for many more of our neighbors, too. We could regularly check the outage maps and communicate with the utilities so they were able to address potentially dangerous situations quickly and we could stream video to keep up with developments regionally.”

In 2025, we look forward to bringing you even more ways to enjoy the benefits of your Internet membership with us, including a new Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program to provide our members with upgraded flexibility and convenience. Whether you’ve just joined us or have been a member for many years, we’re so thankful for your trust in our work.

To ensure our tools serve the needs of our global community, we are excited to kick off a comprehensive community research project in 2025 to get insights from various stakeholder groups, which will guide our future enhancement both in the CalyxOS development and membership program. Talk to us on social media, or reach out to us via email, and let us know how we can do better in bringing back control over your privacy and staying connected!

2024 also marks four years since we launched our first grant program at Calyx. This year, Calyx funded Sunset Spark’s work to develop a multi-purpose curriculum focused on privacy, internet infrastructure, and the role of the public and private sectors in our digital world. As a nonprofit organization offering free education in science and technology in the heart of Brooklyn, Sunset Spark equips children and young people from diverse backgrounds with digital literacy and skills they need to enhance self-protection in today’s digital life. This curriculum aims to close the gap in digital inequality and assist K-8 school teachers in recentering technology education on privacy and freedom topics – concerns that are timely and relevant to students and their families. Learning from this and our previous work, we are coming back in 2025 with an even bigger and more refined grant program to support passionate people and projects in the internet freedom ecosystem.

Calyx has always been passionate about building community resources in addition to tool- and grantmaking-support for people to get more native in FOSS tools and digital privacy. As we reflect on research work we published throughout the past years, we are strategizing for a more integrated plan to provide research and educational resources on privacy, security, and other imperative topics in the digital realm. In 2025, we will regularly share a series of bite-sized digital privacy and security tips, and launch more collaborations with Calyx’s partners in promoting valuable resources for individual online safety and security.

Join our community effort!

None of our work can be done without you. It is the individual support from each of you that allows us to synergize efforts to keep digital privacy and connectivity accessible to our members, communities and beyond. As 2025 approaches, there are more ways you can join this movement to protect your rights to data privacy and internet access. Here’s how:

Become a Calyx member

The best way to support Calyx’s mission is to become a member. Sign up for a membership today! You will receive a thank you gift for your generous support. You can also let us know how we can make our membership program better by emailing us at help@calyxinstitute.org.

Donate to Calyx—and double the impact with employer match!

Every contribution, no matter the size, brings us one step closer to fulfilling our mission. You can double the impact of your gift instantly if your employer matches your donation. Click here to learn more about how employer donation matching can take your donation even further with a few easy steps.

Stay connected to Calyx updates and news

Starting in 2025, we will send regular community updates and resources to everyone who is interested. You can support us by staying up to date with our news and subscribing to the Calyx newsletter! Keep an eye out for the invitation to subscribe in Q1 2025.

If you prefer social channels, you can follow and engage with us on Mastodon, Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram, or join our Matrix channel.

Spread the word

Don’t forget to share our digital privacy news and resources with friends and family! By spreading the word about Calyx’s mission and membership program, you can help us continue defending digital privacy, advancing connectivity, and working toward a future where everyone has access to the resources and tools they need to remain securely connected.

Together, we are building a movement to reshape our digital future towards privacy and internet freedom for everyone!

Thanks for all your support,
The Calyx Institute Team

Our CalyxOS Privacy Champion membership is back, now with the Pixel 7a as a membership premium! CalyxOS phone memberships are a great way to invest in a more private phone experience, as well as support our nonprofit mission to develop and distribute free online privacy tools. Plus, they make great gifts! You can learn more and sign up here

A new CalyxOS Privacy Champion membership that includes a Pixel 7a pre-flashed with our CalyxOS privacy-focused operating system is $700 for the first year and $10 to renew if you'd like to continue supporting our work maintaining and improving CalyxOS.

CalyxOS offers a suite of features inspired by our core principles of Privacy By Design, like encrypted backups, secure communications, control over when and how your apps communicate, and more. These advances pair perfectly with the Pixel 7a's excellent technological capabilities, including Google's improved Tensor G2 chipset, which provides better performance and faster processing speeds compared to the Tensor G1 chipset in the Pixel 6a. The 7a also features a dual rear camera system, 8GB RAM, up to 90Hz Smooth Display, and wireless charging. You can view more details here

Want to make your CalyxOS phone membership even better? Combine it with our unlimited wifi hotspot membership! Our CalyxOS phone memberships do not come with any wifi or data benefits included, and can be used with any phone or data carrier.

Thank you for your membership and support,

The Calyx Institute

We are excited to announce that Contributor Plus memberships will now come with a brand new device: the Franklin JEXtream RG2100! This hotspot supports 5G connectivity, Wi-Fi 6, USB tethering, 5x LTE Carrier Aggregation, and has an internal 4x4 MIMO antenna. As with all Calyx Membership hotspots, wifi data is unlimited and unthrottled.

Sign up for a new Contributor Plus membership to get a JEXtream 5G hotspot + a year of unlimited data. A new Contributor Plus membership is $600 for the first year, and renewal dues are $500/year or $175/quarter.

If you are in the middle of your membership period, you also have the option to order the JEXtream as a replacement device for a $250 donation. Just log in to your account with us, click Devices, and then click Order Replacement Device.

Before you decide if a Contributor Plus membership is right for you, check your area on T Mobile’s map to make sure you have adequate 5G coverage. As with all our memberships, the Calyx Institute cannot offer test hotspots or offer refunds if service is inadequate or non-existent. Our wireless hotspots and data plans are offered as a thank you gift to member donors who support our research into privacy protecting communications technology, and are not a commercial transaction.

You can read more about the JEXtream 5G hotspot here. If there are any other questions we can answer for you about our memberships or the hotspots we offer as membership premiums, please let us know at help@calyxinstitute.org.