Huge respect to Lichess. Open source, no ads, super clean interface and super functional website. Chess.com is a pain to use compared to it.

All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs

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sillysaurusx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Their lead developer is paid $72k/yr, and mobile developer $49k/yr.

I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.

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tumdum_ an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Can you explain what is interesting in those salaries?

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morcus an hour ago | parent [-]

They are extremely low (at least by the standard of Software Engineers based in the US)

	▲	tumdum_ 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Lichess is a non profit from France (like it’s author) and those salaries quite normal for France.

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sebmellen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Could be part time

	▲	static_motion an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Or full time. In some countries, those are pretty decent salaries. I earn €50k in one of the poorer European countries and that puts me in the top ~8%.
	▲	sillysaurusx 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I thought so too, but another entry in their sheet is "Sysadmin (part time)" for $18k/yr. So either they forgot to put part time in parens, or they're paid full time wages. I wonder which...

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DEDLINE 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

100%. Beautiful property. Thank you, Lichess, for everything you do.

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lxgr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's truly phenomenal.

Even my diamond platinum extreme chess.com subscription (or however the third-best tier of a dozen or so is called) has much less functionality than Lichess's only tier.

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elAhmo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Quite amazing to see that "French social security / pension contrib" are almost the same as their total server costs, and there is loads of them.

With just a few employees, it is quite interesting to compare how much do some of these contributions cost, effectively affecting only a person or two, compared to a service like Lichess which is used by 5-10 million of users each month.