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The Product Was Never Just the Product

The Product Was Never Just the Product

February 16, 2026·Laura Meerkatz

I’ve been thinking a lot about what a product actually is.

We talk about products like they’re a list of features. What can it do? How much does it cost? What’s on the roadmap? And sure, that matters. But if you’ve spent any real time in the Salesforce nonprofit ecosystem, you know the Nonprofit Success Pack was never just a set of features. It was never just household management and rollup calculations and recurring donation schedules.

The product was the experience of figuring it out alongside other people who cared about the same things you did.

It was the documentation that volunteers wrote and maintained. It was the Community Sprints where someone who’d never written a line of Apex could sit down and contribute something that mattered — because knowing what confuses users, knowing what’s missing, knowing what your organization actually needs day-to-day: that is the contribution. It was the thousands of consultants and admins answering each other’s questions on the Hub, not because anyone was paying them to, but because that’s what you do when you’re part of something.

How many experts were out there who knew NPSP inside and out? How many of them were showing up in public forums, offering advice to people who weren’t their clients? How many people were building creative solutions on top of it, using it in ways nobody planned for, making it better just by working with it? We don’t usually think of that as part of the product. But it was one of the most critical things we had.

I don’t think you can manufacture that from a centralized source whose primary job is building world-class enterprise software. You get other things from that model — real engineering brilliance, extensive data model vetting, official support channels. Those things matter, and I genuinely mean that. But the community piece, the collective ownership, the spirit of “all of us working together toward a goal that isn’t about raising stock value” — that’s a different thing entirely. That’s a mutual aid model. That’s a garden, not a product roadmap.

So here’s what we built.

Today I’m announcing NPPatch — a community-maintained, unlocked second-generation package that consolidates the full NPSP codebase into a single installable package that the community can run, maintain, and improve on its own terms.

If you’ve been in the nonprofit Salesforce space, you know the context. Salesforce ended active NPSP innovation in favor of Agentforce Nonprofit. Thousands of organizations — many of them small, many of them operating on shoestring budgets — were left weighing their options. Some moved to Agentforce Nonprofit and are doing great work there. But others felt pushed toward a product that might not be the right fit, not because they thought it was better, but because they thought it was the only path forward.

NPPatch exists because we don’t think it should be the only path forward.

What’s actually different

The original NPSP was distributed as six Salesforce-controlled managed packages. The code was open source under a BSD-3 license — you could read it, you could contribute to it — but Salesforce decided what got merged, when updates shipped, and what they contained. The openness was real in spirit but limited in practice.

NPPatch changes that. We’ve consolidated all six packages into a single repository and we’re distributing it as a namespaced, unlocked 2GP. Here’s why those words matter if you’re not a packaging nerd:

Unlocked means the community — not Salesforce — controls what gets built and when it ships. The source is visible, auditable, and open to contribution. If something isn’t working the way your organization needs it to, you can contribute the fix through the community repository, or commission someone to build it — without waiting for Salesforce’s approval or roadmap.

Namespaced means there’s still a clean upgrade path. When the community ships improvements, you can pull them in as version upgrades. Autonomy without isolation.

Single package means no more juggling six separate installations. One install, one codebase, one thing to manage.

The full feature set is there — households, recurring donations, gift entry, customizable rollups, GAU allocations, relationships, affiliations, engagement plans, payments, levels, all of it.

Why the name

If you’ve spent time in Seattle, you might know what a P-Patch is. In 1970, a UW student asked her neighbors — the Picardo family, Italian immigrants who ran a small truck farm — if she could use a corner of their land for a garden. They said yes. That one act of neighborly generosity eventually became a citywide network of over 90 community gardens, tended by thousands of households, donating tens of thousands of pounds of produce to food banks every year.

A P-Patch isn’t a commercial farm. It’s shared ground where people show up, tend their plots, share what they grow, and take care of the common spaces together. The program has survived budget crises and development pressure and decades of change — not because of any single institution, but because the community that depends on it keeps choosing to sustain it.

That felt right.

NP for nonprofit. Patch for the garden. Patch for the software fix that keeps something running and makes it better over time. And if you put NPPatch next to NPSP, the family resemblance is right there. This isn’t a replacement that pretends the original never existed. It’s a continuation.

What this is and isn’t

This isn’t a fork born out of anger. I’ll be honest — I’ve written publicly about the frustration a lot of us feel right now.

But NPPatch isn’t about that frustration. It’s about the part that comes after — when you look at the situation clearly and decide to build something anyway.

I’m genuinely excited about a lot of what’s being built in Agentforce Nonprofit. I want it to succeed. I want organizations to choose it when it’s the right fit. And I want organizations to have a real alternative when it’s not. Those two things aren’t in conflict.

The garden is open

The early NPSP contributors didn’t know they were building something that would serve tens of thousands of organizations when they showed up at those first Sprints. They just showed up and did the work. The soil got richer because people kept coming back.

That’s what we’re inviting you to do.

Bring your plot. Grow something. Share what works.

Try the NPPatch Beta: A Step-by-Step Guide