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Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Lichess is so fucking cool. It's easily one of my top inspirations for building a company "right."

My favorite part of Lichess is their open financials. Check it out: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...

If you want to know the exact amount to donate to offset your gameplay - you can actually do that.

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I think "company" is the word that belongs in quotation marks. Not in any demeaning way, but, amongst coders, building something like Lichess is about as idolized and likely as becoming a YouTuber is for kids.

Also, the reality of trying is probably gonna suck super hard and require work and focus beyond what most people would ever be willing to do.

But it sure is easy to imagine how great it could be.

Creating something good and open source is not a delusional dream imo. Whether it catches on is another matter. But even a relatively modest following is a very fine result. I first learned of lichess some years ago when I was looking to make my own chess UI and discovered their high quality open source chess library

The special thing about Lichess is not that it's good and open source, but that it actually pays an okay-ish salary to work on fulltime, while upholding all those lofty goals. It's an actual job. Without the whole thing being paid for by FAANG.

>but that it actually pays an okay/ish salary to work on fulltime, while upholding all those lofty goals.

He pays himself a fairly low salary for the work he is putting in.

Not really for you to decide, right? How much of your wage would you cede to not have any management? People answer that question differently.

not for French devs who dont live in Paris or other big cities

The amount they spend on server costs should be an eye opener to most enterprises who are spending 10x more and have 100x fewer users.

Fascinating. Looks like the cost per game is $0.00028, or about $1 per 3,500 games.

These types of businesses only work when they cater to a niche audience with a higher than average reasoning ability. Sucks, but it's still great when you find ones to be a part of!

props to founders & gov of France that has special funding for such institutions.

Except if you look at their financials they are paying a huge tax being a French company. Their resources would go further if they left.

Because in ither countries you would not pay taxes at all…

No they are a non profit.

If you have employees you still need to pay employee taxes

which is what enables the French government to fund companies like lichess in the first place.

>Their resources would go further if they left.

So, what, say "thanks for the funding that got us started, we're off to fill our pockets somewhere else now"?

… Absolutely yes? Governments are amoral entities, and this particular relationship is based entirely on power (pay us or else), not mutual respect or any of the other things that characterize human social relationships.

If we must anthropomorphize them anyways, then they have paid back in taxes many times more than they were given to start. Any such "implicit" debt was long since paid, so they could move with a clear conscience.

You do get back a lot from the taxes you're paying, at least in many European countries, where healthcare is widely available to all. I don't feel bad paying what an American would consider "a lot of taxes" because I know it could (but doesn't always) go to helping my neighbor who maybe wouldn't be able to pay for a hospital visit if not. I also use all the built infrastructure every single day, and maintaining it costs money, obviously.

How much money were they given to start? I looked around for the numbers but I couldn't find it, but seems you were able to, could you share the full number you found?

Not to take this conversation too far off track, but the reverse argument could just as easily be made. Companies are amoral entities, existing only to deliver whatever value their owners wish to extract. Governments, meanwhile, are just the manifestation of the will of the people who live in a place. Even currency itself is just a creation of the people by way of the government; no business has any particular right to it.

Not only just as easily, but much more easily assuming somewhat functioning democracy.

I don't even dare ask what your opinion would be of concepts as nation or homeland.

Maybe I'm too European, but ~5K out of ~44K total per month doesn't seem too bad. It's also based on what they earn, rather than a static sum, so seems totally OK for what you get back from it.

Not really. Taxes are so high because people get a lot of things for cheap/free like Healthcare and education. In countries where this isn't the case (USA for example) you'd easily pay 2 to 3 times the salary to get the same developer.

In this case even only paying the main dev a US wage would be more than the taxes on everything.

To be snarky:

How many US people who run non profits end up with a “major health event” and have to beg for donations for surgery or something?

While the EU people running non profits just… go to the doctor when they’re sick…

go further and do what-hire one more dev?

If they lived in the US, they probably would have needed to draw a double or triple salary? So not sure if they really are paying that much more for being in France in the end.

> Their resources would go further if they left.

No, because they would have to pay on the open market for the things those taxes provide for. The tax they’re paying is insignificant compared to their costs.

You’ll note their developer costs are a fraction of what they would be in the US.

Lichess sysadmin (and trustee) here!

We're paying taxes on our employees, they're paid like regular French employees and therefore the employer is taxed accordingly. This is not income tax on our donations or swag sales.

I would prefer if the non-profit in France were "employer-taxed" less than for-profit companies, but no one seems to care.

(I'm a Lichess sysadmin & trustee)

So far France has given us exactly 0 euros and 0 cents, but has required us to hire and pay an accounting company to certify our books due to the level of donations we're receiving.

We could maybe argue that being allowed to exist as a non-profit is something France deserves kudos for, if you're in a good mood.

Kind of fascinating that their biggest cost is site moderation! This seems... odd for a site whose main mechanic really isn't social networking.

I might be wrong, but I think it's considered moderation (at least some of) the anti-cheating controls in place.

I play regularly on lichess. I got insulted a couple of times in the game chat. Looking at the scale of lichess, I am sure it adds up.

Me too, but it's still much better on lichess than chess.com in my experience. Also, cheating is not as bad on lichess

Have you looked at "Zen mode"? It removes the chat while you're playing ... you'll still see any insults after the game though ;)

I know Zen mode, however, most interactions are pleasant so I don't enable it by default, but typically when someone bothers me in the chat.

I've never ever looked at the chat. And knowing that it costs money, and quite a lot, to moderate that, I'll never report anyone. It's just vanity. I don't care what you write to me. I just beat you in the game. Just cry it out. There you go.

I report these people in the hope that other players don't have to experience their hateful comments.

Goes to show you how difficult and demanding moderation truly is, and why popular sites/services routinely fail to do it effectively. It's a quite proactive process.

That's an incredibly good point. I would think you'd need a pretty modest operation when it comes to that for a site like lichess, and the fact that it is the biggest expense really puts into focus the kind of scale the problem likely is at the bigger social media sites.

Nothing is modest at Lichess scale, we have a few million users, several thousand of them post in forums daily and chat with each other.

Also, we're a chess website with more than one million games per day, and some people like to cheat. We're classifying "fair play and anti-cheating" as "moderation" in our expenses because the two are intertwined.

There is all kinds of player bad behavior that needs to be manually verified - cheating is the obvious one, but there's also smurfing, excessive sandbagging, clock abuse (e.g. letting your clock tick down to zero in a loss, just to be annoying).

What's smurfing and sandbagging?

EDIT: I ask because I was once accused of smurfing (I'm only a casual player) in the chat during the endgame.

Smurfing is when you disguise yourself as a noob on an alternate account when you are really more skilled.

Sandbagging is related: deliberately losing to play people with lower ratings.

Chess players are some of the saltiest people on Earth, people can get really mean in chat. Also cheaters galore

The saltiness is much, much less than in some games (shooters, mobas) but a portion of every playerbase thinks they are the worst one even if they are not.

Extremely good point, I don't really game outside of online chess so I can't say that I have a very wide sample pool. TBH the chat I used to see when my brother was playing League blew any chess experience I've had out of the water. I'd almost use a word beyond "salty" for that

why are the developers' salaries so low? $60k a year??

That is not a low salary for France, which is where the devs are.

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france

That site inflates salaries because it oversamples devs who work remotely for American companies. For example the site claims Ukrainian devs make $57k a year.

In most places in the world, that's nowhere near a low salary for a developer.

That's a very high salary in a lot of places, perhaps the developers don't feel the need to get 100k+/year...? .-.

That’s.. one way to look at it. Should read “perhaps the company doesn’t feel the need to give developers 100k+/year”.

Well, "the company" in that case is the "main programmer" being paid.

And then one has to consider value of social security provided when comparing with other countries. Health insurance, retirement funds, ...

Lichess is a non-profit with hundreds of volunteers, several part-time paid contributors/moderators and 2 full-time devs, not a company.

That's how much I was paid as a dev in Chicago. I loved that job and would do it again in a heartbeat. It was for a midsized educational nonprofit, and I was one of the highest paid workers there already (excluding the C suite). We got so much shit done every day, and I learned and grew so much. Amazing coworkers too.

My next job paid $100k and had me working way way less, barely utilizing my skills. It was a bigger company that was very poorly managed. I spent more time there arguing about Jira points than actually developing anything. My skills and mental health deteoriated. It wasn't worth it.

Seems like Lichess hit that sweet spot of paying a livable wage (in a country where social services are actually a thing) while providing meaningful work on a passion project. Most developers aren't so lucky!

Question from someone who has zero knowledge about managing infrastructure: is all of that absolutely necessary? Only one is marked "we can afford to lose", but $228/mo for a monitoring server seems extremely excessive. Even $44 for "private communcations" (I'm assuming something like RocketChat) surely have cheaper alternatives?

Lichess sysadmin here!

We're self-hosting most of our infra on bare-metal, on the best price/quality hosting provider I know of (OVH). I doubt you could store ~1TB of metrics going back 4 or 5 years on fast NVMe storage for less than this in the cloud.

I love this part.

In contrast, I barely watch Youtube, so getting premium doesn't make sense and I know that everytime I get an ad Google is getting less money than what I'd need to bid to skip the ad. I'd like to be able to have a money pool to outbid ads that would be shown to me and get a decent experience instead.

Yet, I run a forum with a subscription option to remove ads. About 35% of our traffic blocks ads but we only have a hundred or so subscribers out of 150,000 unique visitors a month with a 40% return visitor rate.

People use lots of arguments on why to block ads and not subscribe at the same time.

Why do you permit ad blocking and no subscription ?

We tried asking people to whitelist th site a couple of times but it is not something (the asking) that people like.

I can't seem to find the income. Is this listed anywhere or is just the outgoing "open"?

It's not listed in this page because it varies month-by-month, but we publish our yearly books in a lichess blog post and on the government "Journal Officiel":

2022: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

2021: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta...

The TL;DR is that donations so far exceed our expenses, thanks to the generosity of our userbase, and thanks to the hundreds of volunteers doing work for free.

Being honest is if not the best quality a company can have in 21st century.

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