Re-founding PrestaShop, with you.

To our developers, agencies, partners, merchants, and everyone who has ever built something on PrestaShop,

It’s been six months since I joined PrestaShop, and I’ve already learned a great deal. After a decade as an executive in open-source e-commerce, I didn’t step into this role as a newcomer, yet PrestaShop has given me the opportunity to discover an entirely new facet of our industry.

What I found was a rich and vibrant ecosystem, but also a company that had accumulated a level of inertia and complexity it never should have carried. Simple things, submitting an extension to the Marketplace, becoming a partner, getting certified as an agency, had become needlessly heavy over the years. Not the way a company built on sovereignty, transparency, and agility is supposed to run.

I was brought in to move fast, and the first decision was also the hardest one: giving PrestaShop a blank canvas to rebuild from, which meant letting a significant number of people go. I don't want to soften that or bury it in this letter. It happened, and it mattered. The decision was as difficult as it was necessary, and one I sincerely hope I’ll never have to make again.

That process, formally known as PSE in France, is behind us now, and PrestaShop is fully stepping into its next chapter. Before anything else, I wanted this community to hear it directly from me: what these first six months have taught me, what I want for this company, and what I'll need from all of you to get there.

Putting PrestaShop at the heart of its ecosystem

I took over as CEO of PrestaShop as cyber_Folks finalized the acquisition. I spent my first months mostly listening: to the team, to agencies who've been building on PrestaShop for close to twenty years, to merchants, to partners. What I heard, more than anything, is that this community doesn't just use PrestaShop. It carries it. And yet, for a while now, PrestaShop the company had been operating alongside that community rather than at the center of it: everyone doing their part, often without much coordination or shared understanding of where the whole thing was heading.

So I quickly identified my first objective: to put PrestaShop back at the center of its community, so that everyone involved, us, agencies, merchants, partners, is pulling in the same direction again, and so the momentum it creates actually benefits everyone.

This kind of mindset is how I've always approached things at Sylius, and it's a big part of why cyber_Folks brought both companies together in the first place. We were never the biggest team in that market, and we didn't have the deepest pockets either, but Sylius stayed competitive, and stayed one of the very few players in that space to remain self-funded, because we learned how to actually work and communicate with our community, and because we were willing to work smarter and harder than most of the companies around us.

That's the mindset I want to bring into PrestaShop, both in how we operate internally and in how we show up across the ecosystem. It comes down to a simple truth: a platform only stays relevant if the people building on it are genuinely invested in its future.

Going back to our roots and learning from them

There was something else I felt I needed to do before I could really claim to lead this company: meet Bruno Leveque, the person who created PrestaShop almost twenty years ago. I firmly believe that knowing history is essential to make the best bets on the future, and PrestaShop's history starts with Bruno. So I flew to San Francisco to sit down with him. It felt like a true rite of passage, and he seemed genuinely happy to share his experience and reconnect with the company he once built. I couldn't have been happier to hear that Bruno was fully aligned with what I shared with him during our conversation. It also took us back to the very beginning, to why PrestaShop went open source in the first place.

Back when he launched PrestaShop, open source was a movement. The idea was simple: a community of contributors would build something together, code, documentation, ideas, and that would be enough to sustain it. When I asked about the original decision to go open source, Bruno’s answer was candid: it was, at the time, the most effective way to scale visibility and attract investors. It's also just what everyone was doing in the mid-2000s.

Making tough decisions to adapt and endure

Twenty years later, that reality has shifted, and so has PrestaShop, in both good and difficult ways. When I look at this community today, I see agencies built on PrestaShop years ago that are still here, employing people, serving merchants. Nearly two decades of real economic activity has been made possible by this ecosystem: that is no small feat.

But PrestaShop, the company maintaining the infrastructure, hasn't been capturing enough of that value to keep pace. We haven't been the ones making the margin, and for a long time we absorbed that gap. That's part of what I inherited in February, and it's why we've had to make some hard calls since.

One of those tough decisions was to undergo a restructuring process called PSE. To put it simply: PrestaShop wasn't structured to be profitable, focused, or agile enough for today's market, and part of my job has been to change that. This long and formal process has been hard on everyone in the company, but we are now in a better position to work on a top-quality e-commerce platform that this community can stand behind and that merchants can fully benefit from.

Re-founding PrestaShop, 20 years later

It's not all difficult news, though. There's genuine momentum: the acquisition by cyber_Folks, growing synergies with Sylius, multiple updates in upcoming PrestaShop & Sylius versions, our first joint flagship event, the PS Summit in Lyon this November, and independent signals like this year’s Friends of Presta barometer, confirming PrestaShop remains the leading CMS in Europe for high-traffic stores, in a market where 68% of e-commerce already runs on open source.

Looking back at everything that's happened this year, it feels like we have re-founded PrestaShop, almost twenty years after it first began. We have real traction, real revenue, and a clearer path now to financing PrestaShop's future without compromising what we stand for. This path is what I want to share with you now, and it’s about how to really contribute to making PrestaShop successful and sustainable.

Contributing to PrestaShop, today.

First of all, when people hear “contribute to PrestaShop”, they think pull request, bug report or module. All of that is valid and valuable, but there is one metric that gives some perspective on that conception: across PrestaShop's history, 61% of all contributions to the codebase have come from the PrestaShop team, and 39% from the community. In 2025 alone, that split moved even further toward the team: 72% versus 28%.

Your contribution matters, and there's absolutely no question about that. But the math is clear: the majority of what keeps this codebase moving forward is people on PrestaShop's payroll. Which means that the project’s future heavily depends on the company’s ability to support it: keeping PrestaShop the company healthy is a direct contribution to the open source platform.

And the most direct way to do that is by choosing the official solutions we build with our partners. Every online store needs payments, logistics, third-party integrations, and hosting. When you or your clients use the integrations we build with our partners, PrestaShop earns revenue from that, and it goes straight back into the product.

To be transparent about where that revenue actually comes from: roughly 60% of it comes from payments, through the official PSPs we've built deep integrations with. Another third or so comes from Marketplace purchases, with the remainder split across other channels and marketing.

So when you or your clients choose an official PSP or an official integration, you're picking a solid product, for one thing, but you’re also backing the long-term stability of the platform, since most of what we earn from these partnerships gets reinvested straight back into PrestaShop. It's a bit like buying a product your favorite content creator promotes: you do it because you genuinely rate the product, but it's also what lets them keep making the content you show up for in the first place.

We are currently working on ways to make affiliated modules more visible on the Marketplace, to guide your choice and help you make conscious decisions on your contribution to PrestaShop. Until then, here’s the checklist of the ways you can support the company, and ultimately the project:

1. Use solutions built by PrestaShop partners. Official integrations aren't just endorsed, they're built to a higher bar, and they're maintained.
2. Purchase through the official PrestaShop Marketplace. It's the channel that keeps revenue flowing back into the core product.
3. Allow us to track useful data. I know asking for data sharing in an open-source product is a sensitive topic, but without visibility into how the product is actually used we end up making decisions about the platform's future somewhat in the dark. On top of that, we can only affiliate revenue we track. That's a trade-off I'm asking you to make with us, by enabling our current tool CloudSync.
4. Contribute to the core. Code, documentation, translations, bug reports, this remains foundational, and always will be.

PrestaShop’s commitment, in return

PrestaShop's future depends on an ecosystem that's genuinely invested in it, and actively choosing to route value back through it. I’ve just shared with you what it means concretely, and if you have feedback on how we can make any of this easier or fairer, I want to hear it. I've seen at Sylius that this kind of feedback loop only works if it's a two-way commitment, and I intend to hold PrestaShop to the same standard. If we collectively hold up our end of that, PrestaShop won't just grow, it will become the open, transparent ecosystem it's always aspired to be, more so than at any point in its history.

My personal commitment is that, whatever challenges we face along the way, PrestaShop will stay true to its values and remain a pillar of open-source e-commerce. And if we succeed together, I believe we can take PrestaShop to the position it deserves in this industry, with a reach and reputation worthy of its platform and the strength of the ecosystem behind it.

Next up: join the conversation on September 18

I opened this letter with a promise: more transparency in how PrestaShop operates. I hope what you've just read shows I meant it, and I intend to keep that mindset going forward. On September 18, I'll be hosting a new strategic webinar with our Managing Director, Olivier Binet, live on LinkedIn and open to anyone who wants to join.

The format will be the same as in March: a strategic update from the two of us, followed by an open Q&A. That first session was really the start of a conversation with this community, and we want to keep having it, on a regular basis, not as a one-off. So join us, ask us anything, and help keep that conversation alive.

Thank you for being part of this.