Why Lichess will always be free

Damn liches, we just can't stop em.

There are two interpretations of “why”.

What is the motivation for it being free.

What is the mechanism for it being free.

In one of the links,

> It amounts to $170 per month. Great news: I have a job (at prismic.io) and I can completely afford that. Lichess is my hobby, and all hobbies cost a bit of money. I can tell you that the joy of building lichess is absolutely worth the price I pay for it!

Maybe it’s because I spend some number of hours a week looking at trees, but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid the average technical person is around the word “forever”. If you don’t have a trust set up to pay the hosting costs in perpetuity, you’re one recession or bad illness away from it being ad-supported. Or Microsoft could make you an offer you can’t refuse like they did with Minecraft.

There are plenty of legal and financial constructs meant to approximate a forever status, and I don’t see any evidence that anyone has tried to achieve any of them.

When are we going to call “making promises you cannot keep” what it really is? Lying.

> There is absolutely nothing positive about advertisements on websites from the perspective of their users. They eat up valuable screen space and bandwidth for something that nobody wants to see. They often manipulate and misinform. They have even been the source of security vulnerabilities many times in the past.

While I share the loathing of modern Ads as a service or whatever the technical name for giving Google/Ad Choices a blank check to serve whatever they want on a piece of your web real estate, I think you can certainly put up a banner or something responsibly. If I run a web dev blog and I put a banner for my VPS that has a my referral code, or I come to an agreement with said VPS to show an ad for guaranteed credit or I just sell the space directly to XYZ company that is relevant to my users I think that is a legit way to get a little income without burdening my users.

If Lichess decided to promote some chess books or software on their page to supplement their donations, I would be OK with that as long as it's done tastefully and responsibly.

Puzzle Streak/Storm/Racer are the only equivalents that Lichess lacked from Chess.com, but so happy to see them added (like 1-2 months ago?)

Lichess is responsible for most of my chess progress through matches, puzzles, analysis board. Excellent piece of software.

People don't want to hear it. They want to believe in those promises. They like being told beautiful lies.