This may sound naive, but what are the incentives and/or how are the developers of Lichess making a profit. The site is one of the best executed webapps I've ever used. What motivates the creators?
It's purely donation driven and he pulls a small salary from whatever's leftover after buying enough servers to keep the site up.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CGgu-7aNxlZkjLl9l-Ol...
( link came from here https://en.lichess.org/patron )