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
All their finances are also public: https://lichess.org/costs
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
Mistral is *for* profit.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.
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.
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.
> Anyways competition is good.
I agree, and I have no issue with competition paid or free, but I’d have hoped that the paid one would at least also offer a better product.
I’m also to pay for chess courses! Chess.com is just not worth the price to me. I like their narrated game reviews slightly better than Lichess’s purely centipawn-driven mistake practice system, but everything else about their interface is much worse.