That's a cheap project. I have seen a single developer's salary to be more than that. Considering that around a billion games were played last year in lichess.

What I find interesting is the part at the bottom that shows how much a donation helps: a $5 donation is enough to cover the company's budget for 6 minutes. This sounds really good for a few reasons: 1) since I play Lichess for several hours a month, I feel that I'm really getting my money's worth; 2) Lichess only needs a few thousand people to contribute $5/mo to stay net positive and I feel like it's easier to convince a few thousand people in a supportive community to part ways with $5 than it is for other companies to get a million people to donate $1; 3) I remember Reddit used to show on your profile how many server minutes your Gold purchase was worth and it would display something like 200 minutes for every $5 purchase, but this is only a single server out of hundreds and doesn't account for any other expenses, so Lichess is unsurprisingly very cheap to operate in comparison.

Uh, $55k a year is not cheap! What world... Ok, it's late, I'll hold back the rest of my words. :)

I think you were saying it's cheap relative to the impact it has. I agree. But "holy hell that's expensive" is an entirely accurate reaction for someone who wants to fund it out of pocket.

(Gwern covers our TPU/ML infrastructure costs for around $350/mo, and I wince that I wasn't able to optimize it cheaper.)

55k is just the cost of the server. The total cost is 400k

Holy guacamole, I didn't scroll down far enough. Thank you for pointing this out.

"French taxes" is $53k, which is nearly equal to their server fees. Wow.

Props to them for however they manage to get $400k/yr for a free project with no business model, and no intended business model. (I'm serious; it's a wonderful thing for the world, and a tremendous example of what people can achieve without having a monetary focus.)