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?
People working in non profits typically earn less, yes. In general, salary is not a function of how praiseworthy or important or even hard the work is. People who work for non profits have pay cut, because basically they are willing to be paid less in exchange of doing something they see as meaningful.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
Dude, Lichess is entirely funded by donations. There's only so much money to go around.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
True
However a french chess streamer I follow had an interesting take: since Lichess is all free, all the content is computer generated, or low quality. Apparently, some content even was just stolen content from other paid platforms. His take is basically that Chess.com gives out money to many chess actors (teachers, coaches, book writers) while lichess is not helping the whole ecosystem make money. Anyways competition is good.
That’s fine by me: Not everything needs to be about money.
> 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.
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
Magnus has said multiple times in the past - through the predecessors he owned or was involved with that he is not involved in the business side much at all; he's mostly an investor and a promotional actor. Of course they didn't do this without his agreement. He's always been a fan of Lichess too and played lots of their tournaments.
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.
Magnus "drives meaningful outcomes" because he's really good at chess and members of the public enjoy watching him play, so various chess-related businesses will pay him money for sponsorship. How do you propose to "not allow him" that influence? Ban all use of people's names in marketing and products?
My commentary goes above and beyond just Magnus. Re: Magnus. Sponsorships are fine. Him making money is fine. He shouldn't be able to dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played. IMO.
He's not the first person to be "really good at chess".
It's a broad statement meant to mean "celebrities have too big of a platform and too much influence over the average joe".
Magnus doesn't "dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played", so I'm not sure what your point is.
You think Magnus should be forced to participate in chess events he doesn't enjoy / doesn't like the format of? Or you think organizations like FIDE or chess.com should be blocked from trying to entice Magnus to participate in their events?
Thank you being a rare sensible voice on this topic. The fanboyism of chess fans is insane these days. I get that the average age of chess fans these days is very low, probably 14 or so, but it’s still pretty annoying.
I love Lichess more than anything, and I hope this brings a lot of donation to them that they can use independently, and that the Lichess brand does not get subsumed by Take Take Take and their corporate money.
Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
It's the same principle that makes so many people unreasonably sympathetic to the concerns of those much wealthier than themselves: The statistically implausible assumption that they, too, will soon be part of the 1% somehow. Better start acting the part early!
Depending on the development cost of being in the cloud, it was probably the right choice. Optimizing for cost per user when you don't have product market fit is probably the worse early optimization.
Cloud is more cost effective the less of it you have because it doesn’t cost 3x more to maintain a kubernetes cluster with thrice the nodes, but it does cost 3x more to rent one. This is even more true for serverless.
I can imagine a lot of small apps buy into serverless at a time where it’s legitimately the most cost-effective solution and then they’re stuck because serverless platforms are easy to lock yourself into.
> That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
This. I kind of wish if more people knew about it. Also even 1% can be too big. I mean Lichess is literally having millions of people if not more, It's definitely within the 0.001% group.
I kind of wish to do something in this space in the future, I do feel like its just that people don't know about it. I have been thinking to approach some companies and just tell them how much they can save if they migrate and use open source solutions and these dedi servers and setting things on top of these dedi's/vps's.
I have been thinking of (within future), to contact a few companies and to actually have them save net money from migration while charging them a few hundred bucks a month and I can just have a very handful selection of companies (say 15-20) to have enough money so that I can eat french fries and manage their servers!
It feels a win-win-win situation for everyone except AWS/GCP/Azure who wish to suggest that scalability is hard etc. and this false premise for most if not essentially* all businesses.
Personally, I am also saying things like slack for example, I don't understand why people might want slack when things like matrix exist and can be self-hosted securely with proper 3-2-1 backups and for most intents and purposes is actually good if not better than slack.
To me, a bit of concern though with this and I am not sure if it is well-founded is what if I set these servers for them, now I will wish to set them up so that they have as little errors as possible but what if the companies start to think that I am doing nothing and then they stop paying my contracts after I have set them up on these dedicated. I guess I hope that they believe in the value of human support and I guess I am also a bit unsure of where do I find such businesses are.
My brother does some freelancing on the side and I ask him these things and he mentions that mostly he has to use AWS, I mention why not dedi and he says that he does what he is asked to do and that company wants him to use AWS so he uses AWS, so I guess within this context, I need companies who are atleast interested in being a bit more open about thinking about dedicated servers.
I am sure that there would be companies interested in all of this and I am interested in doing things for them but I am not sure about the middle part of connecting the two. I would be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts on all of this and have a nice day emsh!
It also seems to have significantly better availability than chess.com, where I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history due to what I can only assume is a server restart.
Lichess has been absolutely fantastic platform. AS a chess enthusiast as an engineer of a chess website me and some others are building (shameless plug, https://chess67.com), they are the only platform I have worked with where so much is so easily accessible in terms of their APIs.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
Yeah that’s a really interesting point. The openness is mainly what makes Lichess so powerful for organizers and developers.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
Love Lichess. These days I haven't been playing very much but always watching chess streaming commentary. So I was surprised when I saw Take Take Take had a launch party Monday but no stream on Tuesday (getting dumped by chess.com). I never play chess on a phone but I was curious to see how Take Take Take might be incorporating LLM for English language explanation. Last fall I did a sort of proof of concept of this, not nearly fleshed out like the TTT app.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things:
(1) Bring more people to Chess,
(2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Love lichess - I downloaded their chess puzzle database and built a simple app for my son to learn mate-in-3 puzzles. They are amazing and deserve all the love!
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
For anybody who watched the new chess documentary on Netflix about the Magnus vs Hans drama, you'll remember how pissed Magnus and his dad are at chess.com, which is what makes this partnership interesting to me. (Magnus is a TTT cofounder)
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.
It’s a *non* profit so I think it’s perfectly normal that he pays himself that. It’s a good salary which lets him live normal comfortable life.
Mistral is *for* profit.
Just because someone is running non profit they are expected to take 10% of their deserved salary?
People working in non profits typically earn less, yes. In general, salary is not a function of how praiseworthy or important or even hard the work is. People who work for non profits have pay cut, because basically they are willing to be paid less in exchange of doing something they see as meaningful.
(Excluding purely "money washing for local mafia and politicians" non profits.)
Dude, Lichess is entirely funded by donations. There's only so much money to go around.
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.
A huge difference between just for fun and money oriented products.
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
Let’s talk. Email is in my bio!
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...
100%. Beautiful property. Thank you, Lichess, for everything you do.
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.
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.
True However a french chess streamer I follow had an interesting take: since Lichess is all free, all the content is computer generated, or low quality. Apparently, some content even was just stolen content from other paid platforms. His take is basically that Chess.com gives out money to many chess actors (teachers, coaches, book writers) while lichess is not helping the whole ecosystem make money. Anyways competition is good.
That’s fine by me: Not everything needs to be about money.
> 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.
The linked post on Take Take Take is interesting. Magnus Carlsen created a chess.com competitor and eventually sold it to chess.com and became a sponsor. While working as a sponsor he then created a new chess.com competitor.
I'm a Lichess patron and happy to see them get support, but I do feel a bit bad for chess.com in this case. Magnus is such a big figure in chess that organizations like FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims, but that doesn't come with any guarantees. I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
> I do feel a bit bad for chess.com
I'm sure they'll be crying all the way to the bank.
> I hope Lichess does not find themselves in a poor position if Magnus decides to "alter the deal".
I also hope they manage to avoid becoming dependent on whatever this deal grants them.
They have a choice: study chess and beat Magnus. Until then I will care about Magnus (and lichess) more then those businesses.
The best thing they did was that they bought an amazing domain name.
> FIDE and chess.com feel they have no choice but to accommodate his whims
FIDE and chess.com did behave pretty shitty sometimes and I think its good Magnus is in a position to counter them a bit.
I don’t. Everyone ends up affected by the whims of a celebrity in this case.
Magnus has said multiple times in the past - through the predecessors he owned or was involved with that he is not involved in the business side much at all; he's mostly an investor and a promotional actor. Of course they didn't do this without his agreement. He's always been a fan of Lichess too and played lots of their tournaments.
Business is business. Non-competes expire. Don't waste your feelings on chess.com.
From TTT:
> Magnus Carlsen, co-founder of Take Take Take, will not be actively promoting the platform at launch. With Take Take Take now offering a full play and learning experience, it enters territory that conflicts with his ambassador agreement with Chess.com. He remains a co-founder and the company's largest shareholder, and the team expects his involvement to resume once those contractual constraints change. For now, the product will have to speak for itself.
All large systems are inherently weak when one individual has an outsized influence on their outcomes. The solution is not to hope Magnus is altruistic, but to not allow Magnus (or any individual) to drive meaningful outcomes directly or through their combined influence/followings.
Magnus "drives meaningful outcomes" because he's really good at chess and members of the public enjoy watching him play, so various chess-related businesses will pay him money for sponsorship. How do you propose to "not allow him" that influence? Ban all use of people's names in marketing and products?
My commentary goes above and beyond just Magnus. Re: Magnus. Sponsorships are fine. Him making money is fine. He shouldn't be able to dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played. IMO.
He's not the first person to be "really good at chess".
It's a broad statement meant to mean "celebrities have too big of a platform and too much influence over the average joe".
Magnus doesn't "dictate the rules of the game or the platforms by which it is played", so I'm not sure what your point is.
You think Magnus should be forced to participate in chess events he doesn't enjoy / doesn't like the format of? Or you think organizations like FIDE or chess.com should be blocked from trying to entice Magnus to participate in their events?
Please be more specific and concrete.
Well for the chess world, open source world (BDFL), etc probably okay. For real world governments...
Thank you being a rare sensible voice on this topic. The fanboyism of chess fans is insane these days. I get that the average age of chess fans these days is very low, probably 14 or so, but it’s still pretty annoying.
I love Lichess more than anything, and I hope this brings a lot of donation to them that they can use independently, and that the Lichess brand does not get subsumed by Take Take Take and their corporate money.
Lichess is incredibly well optimized [0] (and an amazing public service). I'm sure that this is very cost effective for TTT, so a win-win.
[0] https://lichess.org/@/revoof/blog/optimizing-the-tablebase-s...
Lichess is written in Scala and is hosted on dedicated OVH for a very significantly small amount of money (I think just a few thousand dollars per month) and hosts so many millions of players and games.
It's an understatement how well optimized they are right down to the optimization techniques that they use and the infra providers that they use. The same thing even in something like AWS could cause significantly more amount of money.
It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
Lichess is a beacon of hope and congrats to the lichess team for this cooperation with TTT.
> It also shows that you don't need AWS/GCP/Azure for basically just about everything, to be honest.
That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
Flashback to a moment in my life where a team pushed (successfully) for building a distributed architecture for an app that we didn't even knew if it had product market fit yet. Fast forward 3 years to today and the app is no longer online, but while it had 5 users they were using really reliable infrastructure, I guess that's cool.
It's the same principle that makes so many people unreasonably sympathetic to the concerns of those much wealthier than themselves: The statistically implausible assumption that they, too, will soon be part of the 1% somehow. Better start acting the part early!
Depending on the development cost of being in the cloud, it was probably the right choice. Optimizing for cost per user when you don't have product market fit is probably the worse early optimization.
Cloud is more cost effective the less of it you have because it doesn’t cost 3x more to maintain a kubernetes cluster with thrice the nodes, but it does cost 3x more to rent one. This is even more true for serverless.
I can imagine a lot of small apps buy into serverless at a time where it’s legitimately the most cost-effective solution and then they’re stuck because serverless platforms are easy to lock yourself into.
> That's where they won, people think AWS/GCP/Azure has to be the default while in reality, the number of platforms that actually need to be able to scale up/down fast are probably below 1% of all platforms out there. Most platforms would save money and run better with proper dedicated hardware rather than going for clouds by default.
This. I kind of wish if more people knew about it. Also even 1% can be too big. I mean Lichess is literally having millions of people if not more, It's definitely within the 0.001% group.
I kind of wish to do something in this space in the future, I do feel like its just that people don't know about it. I have been thinking to approach some companies and just tell them how much they can save if they migrate and use open source solutions and these dedi servers and setting things on top of these dedi's/vps's.
I have been thinking of (within future), to contact a few companies and to actually have them save net money from migration while charging them a few hundred bucks a month and I can just have a very handful selection of companies (say 15-20) to have enough money so that I can eat french fries and manage their servers!
It feels a win-win-win situation for everyone except AWS/GCP/Azure who wish to suggest that scalability is hard etc. and this false premise for most if not essentially* all businesses.
Personally, I am also saying things like slack for example, I don't understand why people might want slack when things like matrix exist and can be self-hosted securely with proper 3-2-1 backups and for most intents and purposes is actually good if not better than slack.
To me, a bit of concern though with this and I am not sure if it is well-founded is what if I set these servers for them, now I will wish to set them up so that they have as little errors as possible but what if the companies start to think that I am doing nothing and then they stop paying my contracts after I have set them up on these dedicated. I guess I hope that they believe in the value of human support and I guess I am also a bit unsure of where do I find such businesses are.
My brother does some freelancing on the side and I ask him these things and he mentions that mostly he has to use AWS, I mention why not dedi and he says that he does what he is asked to do and that company wants him to use AWS so he uses AWS, so I guess within this context, I need companies who are atleast interested in being a bit more open about thinking about dedicated servers.
I am sure that there would be companies interested in all of this and I am interested in doing things for them but I am not sure about the middle part of connecting the two. I would be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts on all of this and have a nice day emsh!
It also seems to have significantly better availability than chess.com, where I regularly had games end abruptly and be completely removed from my game history due to what I can only assume is a server restart.
Such service should be using anycast based globally distributed server cluster for lowest latency to their user.
OVH does not have that many availability zones or regions either
Saving money is a good thing but QOS also matters.
Lichess has been absolutely fantastic platform. AS a chess enthusiast as an engineer of a chess website me and some others are building (shameless plug, https://chess67.com), they are the only platform I have worked with where so much is so easily accessible in terms of their APIs.
Their Oauth requires to special app registration nor any oauth secrets - only platform I have seen that does that.
I do wonder how this opens up ability for people to integrate Lichess’ player pool to their own apps.
Yeah that’s a really interesting point. The openness is mainly what makes Lichess so powerful for organizers and developers.
chess67 looks interesting from my perspective as a coach and club organizer, especially for running tournaments and gaining exposure for my coaching and events.
But I do wonder where the boundary is long term. If more tools start tapping into the player pool, there’s probably a balance between staying open and preventing people from just free riding on the Lichess ecosystem.
Either way, it’s pretty unique. You don’t really see that level of accessibility elsewhere in the chess world.
Love Lichess. These days I haven't been playing very much but always watching chess streaming commentary. So I was surprised when I saw Take Take Take had a launch party Monday but no stream on Tuesday (getting dumped by chess.com). I never play chess on a phone but I was curious to see how Take Take Take might be incorporating LLM for English language explanation. Last fall I did a sort of proof of concept of this, not nearly fleshed out like the TTT app.
So I literally dusted off an old Android tablet and played one game. Pleased to see I got logged right in to my lichess account, played a 10 + 5 unrated, did game review. I think this should be great for everybody all around, and as others have expressed I hope lichess doesn't get caught up in some business grief. The game review was not earth-shattering but decent move-by-move explanation that I think will help a lot of players, especially newer players.
I will stick to playing on lichess in browser, on a 43" tv monitor, running and reading local Stockfish eval., without the English explan.
Lichess, you guys rock.
Above all, with everything that's happening in the software engineering world rn, I look at Chess as a place were we've seen it play out in the past decades. And Lichess is a big part of that.
I hope this deal helps two things: (1) Bring more people to Chess, (2) Actually, help Lichess find out a way to reward those working in it as much as they deserve.
Keep on the amazing work,
Love lichess - I downloaded their chess puzzle database and built a simple app for my son to learn mate-in-3 puzzles. They are amazing and deserve all the love!
Love Lichess.
The only thing I love about chess.com is the ability to create custom variants, edit them, and unleash them into the wild. Been loving minihouse lately, such a cool variant.
Would love to see Lichess add bughouse, as its cousin Pychess recently debuted it and it seems to work fine. Chess.com has bughouse.
For anybody who watched the new chess documentary on Netflix about the Magnus vs Hans drama, you'll remember how pissed Magnus and his dad are at chess.com, which is what makes this partnership interesting to me. (Magnus is a TTT cofounder)
The free open source model does have its competitive advantages!
Big fan of Lichess here. Such a great and underrated service.
This is huge, congrats to the lichess team.
Well... some people buy debrid subscription for 3 USD/month on the high seas...
Just came here to say that Lichess is amazing. Love it.
As it happens "Take Take Take Sign Cooperation Agreement" is also OpenAI's modus operandi when it comes to the publishing industry.