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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
by SeanAnderson 3y ago
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/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSkHLJKJkb0ZuI4/preview 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.
- treme 3y agoprops to founders & gov of France that has special funding for such institutions.
- marcrosoft 3y agoExcept if you look at their financials they are paying a huge tax being a French company. Their resources would go further if they left.
- rahkiin 3y agoBecause in ither countries you would not pay taxes at all…
- marcrosoft 3y agoNo they are a non profit.
- rahkiin 3y agoIf you have employees you still need to pay employee taxes
- spinningslate 3y agowhich 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"?
- Karunamon 3y ago… 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.
- capableweb 3y agoYou 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?
- jehb 3y agoNot 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.
- beefield 3y agoNot only just as easily, but much more easily assuming somewhat functioning democracy.
- throw_pm23 3y agoI don't even dare ask what your opinion would be of concepts as nation or homeland.
- capableweb 3y agoMaybe 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.
- ThePyCoder 3y agoNot 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.
- nottorp 3y agoTo 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…
- counterintuitiv 3y ago[dead]
- trollytroll69 3y agogo further and do what-hire one more dev?
- matsemann 3y agoIf 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.
- stouset 3y ago> 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.
- lukhas 3y agoLichess 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.
- lukhas 3y ago(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.
- johndhi 3y agowhy are the developers' salaries so low? $60k a year??
- freeCandy 3y agoThat is not a low salary for France, which is where the devs are.
- datpiff 3y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/france
- 0xDEF 3y agoThat site inflates salaries because it oversamples devs who work remotely for American companies. For example the site claims Ukrainian devs make $57k a year.
- Tmpod 3y agoThat's a very high salary in a lot of places, perhaps the developers don't feel the need to get 100k+/year...? .-.
- spiderice 3y agoThat’s.. one way to look at it. Should read “perhaps the company doesn’t feel the need to give developers 100k+/year”.
- johannes1234321 3y agoWell, "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, ...
- lukhas 3y agoLichess is a non-profit with hundreds of volunteers, several part-time paid contributors/moderators and 2 full-time devs, not a company.
- ChicagoBoy11 3y agoKind of fascinating that their biggest cost is site moderation! This seems... odd for a site whose main mechanic really isn't social networking.
- faaabio1618 3y agoI might be wrong, but I think it's considered moderation (at least some of) the anti-cheating controls in place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wirrbel 3y agoI 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.
- zackb 3y agoMe too, but it's still much better on lichess than chess.com in my experience. Also, cheating is not as bad on lichess
- patrickdavey 3y agoHave you looked at "Zen mode"? It removes the chat while you're playing ... you'll still see any insults after the game though ;)
- wirrbel 3y agoI 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.
- Mystery-Machine 3y agoI'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.
- nomilk 3y agoFascinating. Looks like the cost per game is $0.00028, or about $1 per 3,500 games.
- larodi 3y agoBeing honest is if not the best quality a company can have in 21st century.
- jstummbillig 3y agoI 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.
- darepublic 3y agoCreating 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
- jstummbillig 3y agoThe 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.
- Tenoke 3y ago>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.
- timeagain 3y agoNot really for you to decide, right? How much of your wage would you cede to not have any management? People answer that question differently.
- WhrRTheBaboons 3y agonot for French devs who dont live in Paris or other big cities
- PUSH_AX 3y agoI can't seem to find the income. Is this listed anywhere or is just the outgoing "open"?
- lukhas 3y agoIt'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-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:830378717_31122022 https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-deta... 2021: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:830378717_31122021 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.
- Workaccount2 3y agoThese 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!
- dietr1ch 3y agoI 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.
- freitasm 3y agoYet, 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.
- JamesBarney 3y agoThe amount they spend on server costs should be an eye opener to most enterprises who are spending 10x more and have 100x fewer users.
- stepupmakeup 3y agoQuestion 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?
- lukhas 3y agoLichess 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.