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
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
Their lead developer is paid $72k/yr, and mobile developer $49k/yr.
I'm not sure what to think, but that's definitely interesting. I wonder what chess.com is paying their engineers.
Can you explain what is interesting in those salaries?
They are extremely low (at least by the standard of Software Engineers based in the US)
Lichess is a non profit from France (like it’s author) and those salaries quite normal for France.
No it is not. Yes it could be for your average everyday developer but if someone can run site with millions of active users alone, there is no difference in salary based on where the developer stays. Does Mistral pays $100k salary to researchers?
Pretty sure OpenAI pays higher than chess.com
OpenAI doesn't pay 1 developer higher salary than all the chess.com developers combined.
Could be part time
Or full time. In some countries, those are pretty decent salaries. I earn €50k in one of the poorer European countries and that puts me in the top ~8%.
Both would be very decent salaries in South America also
I thought so too, but another entry in their sheet is "Sysadmin (part time)" for $18k/yr. So either they forgot to put part time in parens, or they're paid full time wages. I wonder which...
Quite amazing to see that "French social security / pension contrib" are almost the same as their total server costs, and there is loads of them.
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.
100%. Beautiful property. Thank you, Lichess, for everything you do.
It's truly phenomenal.
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.