It's truly amazing that a product with the reach of Lichess can be run so cheaply. Comments here criticizing the hosting costs extremely myopic - dev time isn't free, and doing a rewrite to chase down hosting savings isn't necessarily a good call.
I just signed up for a monthly donation. I complain about the ad supported internet all the time, but had never donated to LiChess. This thread is a good reminder of how far dollars to support projects like this can go.
FWIW, in the earlier days of lichess, IIRC when it had barely broken the Alexa top 10,000 threshold, lichess ran on like 2 boxes despite serving millions of users.
There's a good chance that many AWS slinging devs here have not actually had to deal with the volume of traffic that lichess sees. Half a mil yearly to run the entire lichess infrastructure, including dev salary and providing stockfish analysis for every user for free takes an insanely efficient setup that most big tech companies could only dream of.
I was wondering what the cost per game is on lichess, and fortunately the linked spreadsheet includes the answer: lichess currently runs at a cost of $0.00022 per game (4545 games to the dollar).
Lots of people saying "You can improve costs here!" without factoring in the developer time/learning/upkeep dollars it would take to do that. Sometimes the best solution is the one you know that will be easiest for you.
It only 420k because they pay themselves minimum salaries. The founder/lead dev is easily worth mid 6 figures on the market and yet his salary is not even 60k EUR.
It's a great project, great quality and run at a low cost but it's all that because it's run by people who sacrifice their financial situation to make their idea happen.
In this thread: people with zero knowledge who can cut costs drastically without impacting the service (that they have never used and don't understand).
Putting others down doesn't help. If you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Then you're addressing the underlying ignorance as well as contributing to the ecosystem, instead of poisoning it further.
It's not a put down to say that there are people without knowledge of Lichess's operations or infrastructure. I'm one of those people. I don't presume to have any knowledge of effective cost cutting measures. Others do.
As someone who is working on a similar project (a chess mmo) and looking to validate a business model in order to get funding, how are they covering the costs?
The answer usually is "donations", but there are only 402 patrons on https://lichess.org/patron and Thibault said on twitter that the average donation is $8. That's $3216/mo, less than a tenth of monthly costs. Is the rest coming from the swag store? From coaches? How much do the donations surpass the costs? Lots of missing pieces from the revenue puzzle.
Maybe you should look at a model where your chess mmo runs on top of another platform? That way a lot of your costs would go down and you could focus on the core parts that you want to build. E.g. you dont really want to spend time paying for or optimizing for hundreds of simultaneous users from multiple countries.
Readit News
In particular:
How they remain free: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
On his salary: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...
I just signed up for a monthly donation. I complain about the ad supported internet all the time, but had never donated to LiChess. This thread is a good reminder of how far dollars to support projects like this can go.
There's a good chance that many AWS slinging devs here have not actually had to deal with the volume of traffic that lichess sees. Half a mil yearly to run the entire lichess infrastructure, including dev salary and providing stockfish analysis for every user for free takes an insanely efficient setup that most big tech companies could only dream of.
Edit: As discussed in another subthread most of the analysis happens in the user's browser, the rest is run via a fishnet by volunteers.
I doubt you can't make Alexa top 10k with a million of daily unique visitors.
One stockfish computer analysis must cost more than merely playing 1,000 unanalyzed games.
It's a great project, great quality and run at a low cost but it's all that because it's run by people who sacrifice their financial situation to make their idea happen.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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