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It takes $420k per year to run Lichess (twitter.com/ornicar)
298 points by i0exception on Jan 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 266 comments



The author did an AMA on Reddit 9 months ago that I think is relevant here: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

In particular:

How they remain free: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

On his salary: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...


It's truly amazing that a product with the reach of Lichess can be run so cheaply. Comments here criticizing the hosting costs extremely myopic - dev time isn't free, and doing a rewrite to chase down hosting savings isn't necessarily a good call.

I just signed up for a monthly donation. I complain about the ad supported internet all the time, but had never donated to LiChess. This thread is a good reminder of how far dollars to support projects like this can go.


FWIW, in the earlier days of lichess, IIRC when it had barely broken the Alexa top 10,000 threshold, lichess ran on like 2 boxes despite serving millions of users.

There's a good chance that many AWS slinging devs here have not actually had to deal with the volume of traffic that lichess sees. Half a mil yearly to run the entire lichess infrastructure, including dev salary and providing stockfish analysis for every user for free takes an insanely efficient setup that most big tech companies could only dream of.


> providing stockfish analysis for every user for free

Edit: As discussed in another subthread most of the analysis happens in the user's browser, the rest is run via a fishnet by volunteers.


While we're in the topic of impressive technological achievements, it's probably also worth mentioning how crazy it is that just a few decades ago, Deep Blue running on a supercomputer was the state of art in chess analysis, and nowadays we can just casually say, oh lichess runs stockfish on users' phones via wasm to cut on server costs.


Most engineers in the world never saw such daily traffic.

I doubt you can't make Alexa top 10k with a million of daily unique visitors.


And people here be afraid of serving small HN traffic without using cloudlfare.


I was wondering what the cost per game is on lichess, and fortunately the linked spreadsheet includes the answer: lichess currently runs at a cost of $0.00022 per game (4545 games to the dollar).


That's good to know. I've played 12,316 games on lichess so almost $3 worth. Might donate $10 or so soon.


Do you computer-analyze your games?

One stockfish computer analysis must cost more than merely playing 1,000 unanalyzed games.


I think Stockfish usually runs clientside but it does look like they do some server side too

https://lichess.org/blog/YOCx7hIAACUAgsUo/stockfish-14-has-a...


You're downloading the engine from the Lichess server but the analysis is done on your computer, with your resources.


Only if you toggle local-evaluation in the analysis board. When you "request a computer analysis", the computation is done by fishnet [1] on volunteers' hardware.

[1] https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet


But can you request a computer analysis with fishnet anymore? I have a non-patron account and I can't find that option anywhere. Old forum posts seem to talk about it working by pressing Z and being limited, but when I press Z I get a message that it is disabled by default and a link to enable it. When pressing to enable, nothing happens.


It's been a while since I used Lichess anonymously, but I suspect you do need an account to request a server analysis – that way they can limit the number of analyses per day for a user [1].

[1] 40 a day per https://lichess.org/features


You don't need to be a patron, you just need an account. One of the many amazing things about lichess is it's 100% free and donators get no extra privileges except a little logo next to their user


Computer analyses are done on a distributed network called fishnet[0], not locally

0: https://github.com/niklasf/fishnet


Except fishnet is used to analyze broadcasted games, puzzle discovery and others. Not used when analyzing your own games. You can easily test this by opening your task manager, monitoring your CPU usage, then opening a game you played on Lichess and toggling the aptly named "local evaluation". It's the toggle bar on the upper right, next to the text "Stockfish 14+ NNUE in local browser". You will see your CPU usage increase while the evaluation is on.


No, that is an analysis of a single position, not a game. The big button under every game which says "Request Computer Analysis" is done on fishnet as well, it literally says "Stockfish 14.1 server analysis".


That is true when you’re playing in your browser. On the mobile app (at least the iOS version) you can request computer analysis for your game done on the server.


You can request server analysis for your own games, up to 40 per day. They use fishnet.


<sarcasm> So ... time to implement fishcoins?</sarcasm>

Analyzing a chess game or two is not exactly easily verifiable, but it should be somehow possible to shoehorn that into a proof of work thing.


I do run a computer analysis on maybe 10% of games, but I also participate in fishnet (explained elsewhere in this thread) on a local machine so that hopefully offsets it


For this reason I wish I could run something locally to generate the same analysis UI and therefore not put any load on the Lichess servers.


Stockfish runs in your own browser using your own CPU.


Not if you do a game analysis


I love Lichess's feature comparison page (https://lichess.org/features), which helps users decide whether to upgrade to a premium account.


Lots of people saying "You can improve costs here!" without factoring in the developer time/learning/upkeep dollars it would take to do that. Sometimes the best solution is the one you know that will be easiest for you.


It only 420k because they pay themselves minimum salaries. The founder/lead dev is easily worth mid 6 figures on the market and yet his salary is not even 60k EUR.

It's a great project, great quality and run at a low cost but it's all that because it's run by people who sacrifice their financial situation to make their idea happen.


And I wish they would be rewarded by their users even more.


They should charge. And I would pay.


They have users because the service is accessible. If they charge, many would playe elsewhere. There is a lot of competition.


In this thread: people with zero knowledge who can cut costs drastically without impacting the service (that they have never used and don't understand).


Putting others down doesn't help. If you know more than others, the thing to do is to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Then you're addressing the underlying ignorance as well as contributing to the ecosystem, instead of poisoning it further.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


It's not a put down to say that there are people without knowledge of Lichess's operations or infrastructure. I'm one of those people. I don't presume to have any knowledge of effective cost cutting measures. Others do.


It's a putdown to snarkily sneer at others in the community, which is why the site guidelines specifically ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I understand the temptation to do this—we all feel it. That's why that guideline is in there. Such comments reliably lead to lower-quality threads, because they don't add anything that anyone can learn from. They just assert the commenter as somehow different from / better than others.

That's not to say the comments you were criticizing aren't bad. Of course, shallow dismissals are bad. But it only makes things worse to respond with a different sort of shallow dismissal.


As someone who is working on a similar project (a chess mmo) and looking to validate a business model in order to get funding, how are they covering the costs? The answer usually is "donations", but there are only 402 patrons on https://lichess.org/patron and Thibault said on twitter that the average donation is $8. That's $3216/mo, less than a tenth of monthly costs. Is the rest coming from the swag store? From coaches? How much do the donations surpass the costs? Lots of missing pieces from the revenue puzzle.


These are just the most recent. ATM there are 10,722 active patron accounts.


Maybe you should look at a model where your chess mmo runs on top of another platform? That way a lot of your costs would go down and you could focus on the core parts that you want to build. E.g. you dont really want to spend time paying for or optimizing for hundreds of simultaneous users from multiple countries.


That’s definitely not every patron


Main developer gets a monthly salary of $4705, is that normal in Europe? (Assuming Europe because they pay French taxes).


Maybe a bit low for someone this experienced, but actually its just above the median salary for a developer in Paris.

Developer salaries in Europe are not the astronomic salaries you see in the US in the major cities. Probably the highest paying in Europe is London in the UK, and even then its still less than 50% of what developers in SF make at probably around 75k USD per year/6-7k USD per month in London.


Funny enough, I just posted a comment about this the other day, how basically every SF/NYC company that has gone full remote could cut their employee costs by nearly 2-3X by switching their dev team to a European time zone. And this is including all the extra taxes involved with having employees there.

And I'm not talking about having to hire in Romania or something (where you could save 4-8X or more). You could hire the top 5% of talent in expensive cities like London and still cut your payroll costs by 2-3X


You can't save that much by hiring in Romania. The differences between developer compensation in europe don't follow cost of living differences, an average software engineer in Poland is likely in a better position when compared to an average Pole than an average software engineer in France vs an average Frenchman.


Maybe 10 years ago I hung out with a Java developer from Hungary for a while, he worked on stuff for Lufthansa. Hopefully I'm not remembering this wrong, but I think he told me his salary was like 1000EUR / month after tax (maybe even less) and that he was still able to afford a large house for his wife & kids and everything he wanted.


There are many companies hiring Brazilians for the same reason, since 1 USD is 5,56 brazilian real and 1 eur is 6,30 brazilian real, it's dirty cheap to hire brazilians on these conditions!


Really? Can't speak for France, but it's definity low, specially for a senior dev. USD 56 470,69 equals EUR 49 465,78 as of today. You still need to pay taxes and (compulsory) social insurance from that. IMHO this is low, in some (western) european countries that amount may is junior dev entry salary IMHO. But someone responsible for a project that big could easily start at EUR 90 000,- or more (~USD 100 000,-). At least this is my experience. Experienced senior devs in German speaking countries I know, which know what they are talking about, don't consider to work for less than EUR 80 000,- gross per year, for some this is the lowest base line. Just recently talked to a friend about that who works for a middle sized (~200 people), not very well known software company in Germany.


yes, but France is cheaper/less well paid than Germany (my guesstimation would be 20-30% less). Most countries are, e.g. Spain, Italy, and of course eastern Europe. Actually, 80k€ is VERY good for developers in Germany, you are not paid these sums easily, but yes if you're good (and willing to change employers and good in interviews) you will get there, that's true.


I can’t find anything in normal EU companies that would be over €80k for IC positions. Where do you find these magic opportunities?



Probably depends on the industry. If you're a wordpress programmer at an ad agency there's no way you are making €80k. But if you're a senior embedded engineer at a big company like Bosch or Siemens, €80k sounds plausible.


Highest paying in Europe is probably Zurich, not London. Salaries are comparable to sub-million-population US cities, which considering Zurich is also sub-million seems like it's actually pretty competitive with the US.


Zurich and Switzerland generally is also much more expensive. Accommodation is hard to find, rents are 50+% over somewhere like London, groceries 2x or more the price, especially beef, and is often low quality. Imported food is harder to find and restaurants are pretty dire.

Good wine is easy enough to find though, and the outdoor scenery is pretty.

I cannot wait until end of Covid and try and spend a large fraction of our weekends outside this place.


From what I've seen, rent is comparable to London when you take things like location and access to the city center into account.

Agreed that restaurants and food are expensive. Selection is smaller than somewhere like London, but with a population 10x lower that's to be expected. Size-wise Zurich is more like Birmingham. If you take local cuisine differences into account I don't think it's that different.

Crime, taxes and pollution are also much lower. It really depends on your priorities.


I rent a 4 bed house in Baden for about 2x the cost of the mortgage on my London house in Enfield (it's not sold yet). The distance to Zurich central is about the same (London is very large, Baden / Zug / Winterthur would be on the edges of Greater London if you overlayed it), but the train is faster for several reasons: geography (mountains) encourages locally dense living, but the overall density is lower, so my house and work offices are closer to stations at either end.

Rental yields are capped in Switzerland, and in practice Zurich rents are not at the market clearing level - renting is actually a beauty contest between applicants. Great apartments are restricted by availability instead of rent level, but even considering that, the rent levels are higher than London, excluding central London - but I lived in London for 14 years, and I'd never really consider living centrally.

I'll reserve judgement on restaurants until post-Covid permits more eating out. I've ordered deliveries from about 20 different places (mostly Zurich, some Baden) and eaten out in three different places. I have a number of preliminary conclusions (Swiss don't know how to make a good burger, Indian restaurant portions are too large and too expensive, there are far too many pizza places and the highest rated ones have been very mediocre, and the most reliably good food has had a high cheese content, whether it's fondue or cordon bleu) but I'll pass deeper judgement later.

Good wine is easy to find though, and my house has a wine cellar.


The restaurant scene has exploded in Zürich over the last 20 years, but this means it's a bit of work to sort between the wheat and the chafe.

It also sounds like you're still trying to eat the cuisine you were in London, and finding the (reliably) high quality food to be the local cuisine.

A few quick recommendations:

Pizza: Napulé (the sit down in Meilen, not the takeaway by Bellevue)

Indian: Kerala (real Indian food, not sweet British-style curry)

Hearty European: Wirtschaft zur Au

Eritrean: Mesob

American: Grain Bar & Restaurant

Turkish: Gül

European breakfast/brunch: Baboo's

Ice-cream: Gelati Tellhof

Enjoy!


The real issue with London is not much rent but the quality of housing. I think London is the last European city where people deal with pests (mice, bed bugs, etc…) in their houses.


Not really, you're competing against a ton of people from different countries if you want to work in Zurich. Switzerland has a ton of foreign people working there.


This doesn't mean dev salaries are lower. Swiss immigration rules are actually quite strict, and between Facebook/Google/Apple/MicrosoftReseach there is a heavy upwards pull on salaries.


I didn't mean that salaries are lower, I meant you need to put it a lot more effort to get them.


worth baring in mind that there's a lot of extra paid by the employer on top of the "gross" salary someone gets in Europe (especially in France) that someone in the US would have to cover by himself (hence why i't typical to see double that amount for someone in the US).


I'm pretty sure once you cost out everything from taxes, health insurance, housing, etc.. whether business or personal costs an equivalent developer in say Paris will have much less disposable income and overall assets than one in SF.


I've posted this reply numerous times here but a junior dev in San Francisco on 120k, after paying taxes and rent has more left over than a mid level engineer in the UK makes in gross pay.


See graph here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax

Though rates probably depend on income so maybe the graph only gives a rough idea (e.g. top taxpayer rates probably higher in Europe and higher rates may kick in earlier in Europe.)


In quite a few European countries it's really not that much on top it. UK is the primary example of it.


Employers national insurance is basically 13.8% on top of salary in the Uk up top some limit.


$56k is €49k at the current moment.

Europe is not all one market price wise, with big differences internally. But you can certainly get a developer for €49k. You might have trouble retaining them, as based on salary surveys on the subreddit Irish developers it's like a 20th-30th percentile salary, and this developer has a track record of leading a successful customer facing web service, but not preposterous.


Yes that's probably near the median dev salary locally.

Some FAANGs understand this and have decided to hire more in Europe.


Depends where in Europe. In Norway or Switzerland that would be low. In Croatia or Italy that would be high.


Starting income for developers in Norway are normally ~€55k. The average 33yo developer income is ~€75k.


I know some developers making that in Norway - but that would be after taxes, not before.


It's somewhat low but they've probably made a concious choice to accept a lower salary to work for a project they are passionate about.


I don't know how much time he dedicates to running the service at this point but the salary seems light if it's full time work.


It's his hobby project that he turned into this, it runs completely by his philosophy, and it's decent money for the country he's in. I think he's won.


It is normal in Stockholm, Sweden, but the local FAANG offices pay much more along with some others. There is a wide distribution.


It’s high. You never get these insane american salaries in europe. I’m lucky if I’ll ever get 60K annually.


For reference $420k is about the cost of 2 employees at a typical tech company.


Which typical tech company outside of Silicon Valley would that be? I’ve never seen wages at $210k for a „typical tech company“


A rough estimate is that the cost of an employee is 1.25x - 1.4x the salary of an employee in the US. With health insurance, Social Security taxes, 401K matching, office expenses, and more.


That seems exceedingly low. I've generally seen 2x. It's a bit less than that as salary goes up, but I can't imagine hitting 1.25x.


An employee costs more than just their salary.


My company isn’t based out of SV, we pay 130-220k base depending on team and experience. Senior devs are 200k+


Hey, it’s me, your future employee!


In Silicon Valley that would be a salary of a single engineer.


The cost of an employee is much higher than just the wages you pay them.


Wages are just part of the total cost of a employee.


About 8 tech employees where I am in Europe. And that's after all the additional costs apart from salary.


5k in French taxes to run a non profit site, why?


Non profit does not mean that it do not have to pay taxes on the money it manipulates.

Non profit orgs receive services from the state and they have a cost to fund social security and such.

Other non profits which do not have a very nice situation can receive help from the state, so why not share the bits of success of Lichess to everyone else?


It's the norm in France for employers to pay another euro of tax for each euro their employees earn.


I assume with "tax" you mean "tax + health insurance + unemployment insurance + retirement savings etc"?


Yes and it was a mistake in my opinion. It make employees feel that the company is paying for these benefits and it makes the company believe that they are spending money for things they should not (I've heard so many CEOs complaining about having to pay "all those taxes for their employees"). I prefer a way where the employee is responsible for all costs with a deduction at the source to make sure you don't get nasty surprises at the end of the year. In term of numbers that's all the same, not in term of psychology.


Incentives and human responses are endlessly weird and interesting.


Sure


Why should non-profit be tax exempt at all?


Because the state was never about making things easier for people.


> $68,600 in Servers


> Candles $3,600

That being said, it's probably a lot cheaper than rewriting it to run on less.


i will never financially recover from this


So, 4 developer salaries for a service used worldwide. Not bad at all.


I love lichess! In addition to the web interface, it's got a great iPad interface too.


> Accountancy - 5,160 > Independent Audit - 6,000

I studied accounting at university and no one plans to do anything but auditing or consulting. I still love accounting, gives the most straight answer of how a business is run. Case in point.


I’m actually surprised how cheap the server cost is , given the scale of linchess… Great job!

Recent years, I have a feeling that HN commenters would assume server cost should always approach $0, not matter how big, or how different a real world online service is different from their single page web app side project :)

For any server cost sharing posts, we’ll see people making comments like “I can run this under $10/month” . Ha


Where does funding come from?


Donations


You can also buy some swag: https://lichess-org.myspreadshop.com/


I wonder google doesn't show Lichess in the first page when I search "lichess"?


I’m surprised French taxes are so high for a non profit


And freechess.org ?


[flagged]


> bottom-of-the-barrel Indian devs with a handful of Western project managers

You started a wretched, tedious flamewar with this casual slur. No doubt you didn't intend it to be that, but it's easy to see why it would land that way, and effects (which actually impact the community and the site) are more important than intent (which doesn't communicate itself unless you take care to disambiguate).

Please don't post like this to HN. It points straight to the hell we don't want here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I worked for a bit for chess.com. Your assumption about "bottom-of-the-barrel" Indian devs is heartless and also incorrect. Be better please.


Hiring devs who are bottom of the barrel and located in India (super low CoL) =/= claiming all Indian devs are bottom of the barrel.

Please try not to jump to racism accusations immediately, it makes the world a worse place. It even goes directly against the rules here at HN, where you are instructed to take the best interpretation of someone’s comment.


But they deliberately chose to point out "Indians" and "Westerners", using a subpar adjective for the former. What gives? Sounds like casual racism to me.


A common thing companies does is fire their expensive developers and outsource development to a cheap country. And those companies usually pick the cheapest developers in the country they outsourced to, hence "bottom of the barrel Indian developers", implying you aren't competing with Googles Indian office but you pick the cheapest people you can find there. And "western product managers" refers to the people who did the outsourcing.

The example might have been a bit too real for your liking, but there is no value judgement here about either group. Or rather, it is a judgement against those western product managers who think it is a good idea to fish for the bottom of the barrel developers anywhere, you can get great developers in India if you pay like Google, Google didn't lower their bar in India. Just that companies that decides to outsource doesn't do it to find quality, they do it to find cheap headcount.


You are right logically. However given the amount of confusion in this thread surely you can see a lot of people _feel_ offended. It’s worth thinking about how to avoid such ambiguity in the future.


I'm worried that, as far as you go to avoid offending others, people might go further to be offended, if "being offended" means "I get to silence others".


[flagged]


There is no harassment here. The natural reading of the post is that he refers to develops stationed in India. India has very low cost for developers, so that is where you go to buy cheap. And then if you take the cheapest developers in India, you have a known value, which is what anyone who reads the post would read it as. You go out of your way here to assume bad intention, this isn't some kind of "I really hate trash Indian developers taking our jobs!" kind of post, it is harder to assume bad intentions than assume good intentions here.


[flagged]


I don't think HackerNews is the correct venue for your ideological posting style.

The rules here, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , are designed with a purpose. Suggest you reread them.


I agree on the sentiment, but quoting from your own link:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.... Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.


I interpret OP‘s comment rather as an intersection, not a union of the targeted dev group. Your last sentence however sounds passive aggressive to me, which I rather don’t want to read here on HN


This just means Chess.com outspends Lichess by an even larger margin.


Haha yeah I think those specs would be 10x on AWS.

GRA, RBX, etc - OVH about as cheap as it gets.


> bottom-of-the-barrel Indian devs with a handful of Western project managers

It's really disappointing to see such casual racism on HN.

Surely you could think of a better adjective than "bottom-of-the-barrel" to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company?


Nobody is doubting that there's amazingly talented Indian developers out there. Some of them are running huge IT companies in the US, as you know. However, anyone who has worked with a "random" outsourced IT company from India knows how atrocious it can be. Between hiring US developers (much more expensive) and average Indian ones, the difference is usually night and day.


I've worked with under-skilled developers all over the world. Including NL where I currently reside - none of them are Indian, all Europeans.

Either way, I wouldn't call entire swathes of any of them "bottom of the barrel".


"bottom of the barrel X developers" means the cheapest/worst among X developers. You can say bottom of the barrel European developers, bottom of the barrel American developers, bottom of the barrel Indian developers etc. None of those statements says anything about how the quality of those developers relates to developers outside of that area, it just says you take the bottom for that particular group.


"bottom of the barrel X developers" can also be really easily read as "developers who are X and therefore bottom of the barrel", and whenever I've heard similar phrases in real life, there's always at least some level of insult being cast on whatever X is.


If he just said "bottom of the barrel developers" people would have assumed he meant "bottom of the barrel developers in USA" and not "bottom of the barrel developers in the World". You can get developers much cheaper in India, which is why you have to add that part as otherwise people would protest the number as unrealistic because not even bottom of the barrel developers are paid that low in the area they were thinking of.

The more accurate description would be "bottom of the barrel developers in India", but people would complain about that as well, but maybe not as much.


[flagged]


I don't see how that is relevant? He just made an analysis of how low their costs could run with that many employees. If their developers aren't stationed in India and paid the lowest going rate for developers there then the discrepancy in costs between these two companies would be even larger.

If you know where their developers are stationed then you could add that information and we could estimate a better number for what their running costs are.


These people are arguing with you over something so basic as common decency and acknowledgement of casual racism. Even here on HN, we are not immune to the density of the ego.


Nobody here said that racism against Indians doesn't exist. But this post isn't an example of that. Right now all you guys are accomplishing is making people feel you are over entitled and not that you are fighting racism. I've seen many people complain about racism against Indians here on HN rightfully, there is no reason to assume Indians are bad or speak as if Indian developers are bad and many people still do those things. But this post isn't one of those racist posts, this post is completely reasonable.


And you can think that, just like people can think you are racist for telling Indians what they can and can’t find reasonable about their own stereotypes.

“I should hire some bottom of the barrel bootcamp graduates”.

Bootcamp graduates in this example is a derogatory name for sub-par devs. We know this because there is a stigma around bootcamp devs in the industry. If you said this, no one is doing the mental gymnastics of “oh, they are separating the great bootcampers from the bottom of the barrel”. No, they assume you look down on bootcamps. Context matters. History matters. Saying “bottom of the barrel Indian devs” in todays software industry, is a racist remark.


> Context matters.

Right. And the context in this case is cost to run a company with a given headcount. The cost of 200 bottom of the barrel developers in America and 200 bottom of the barrel developers in India is substantial, which is why you have to include the location in this context.

If the context was talking about the efficiency of developers instead of cost you would have a point, but it isn't.


“Bottom of the barrel devs in India” !== “bottom of the barrel Indian devs”

Way to move the goal posts. Do I need to explain this? You’ve contextualized the bucket in your new statement.

Why do you think that efficiency difference exists in the first place?

Maybe because Indian/Asian developers are not valued as much as other parts of the world.

Almost as if people treat and talk about them like the bottom of the barrel…

It’s a cycle that you continue to enforce by using that terminology.


> Maybe because Indian/Asian developers are not valued as much as other parts of the world.

Maybe Indian/Asian developer not sell their services at rates they consider cheap. It's a cycle that will continue if they keep selling their labor at low price.


You’re right - I hear other less fortunate parts of the world are ready for their turn to get overworked and underpaid. Not like it has to do with the fact they hold the worlds largest populations or anything. Nah, you’re right. Their boards should tell them to raise prices and reject all else. Who cares if the kids don’t eat?


Then maybe it's you who need to get down from high horse and realize people do not live beyond space and time. And people just can't choose the best things at any place and any time.

> Who cares if the kids don’t eat?

Ah, I thought kids in poor countries could just eat virtues provided free of cost from otherwise no-good virtue signalers.


[flagged]


Where did I assume bad intention?

I explicitly said mistakes happen, chalking it up to accidental wording. Two comments up. [1]

And yes, I went very far out of my way to comment on the website I visit multiple times a day.

You can continue doing your word gymnastics. Again, “devs stationed in India” !== “Indian devs”. Yes, words are ambiguous, which is why it is important we try to get them right!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957642


You are right he could have been more clear, but the backlash here is unwarranted since there was no way that comment was racist. Instead they should just have pointed out that he could have phrased the comment better, but assuming he is racist just because he phrased it poorly like many others here do is just toxic. It is very clear what he meant if you think a bit.


[flagged]


[flagged]


“If he said "If you hire bottom of the barrel American developers" then nobody would have said a thing.”

Because there is no existing, racist, “bottom of the barrel” stereotype around American devs.


[flagged]


Would you please stop perpetutating this flamewar? You've made your point with 16 comments in this thread alone. That's quite enough—this is not a place for repeating the same arguments over and over, which only feeds them.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Ah, here we go.

Have a good Sunday mate.


Would you please stop perpetutating this flamewar? You've made your point with a dozen comments in this thread alone. That's quite enough—this is not a place for repeating the same arguments over and over, which only feeds them.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Actually, it’s fairly amusing but if you even mildly reference the skill level of the mediocre middle-American developer, you will be flagkilled and downvoted.

But there’s a reason those guys are on Reddit and HN complaining they can’t pass whiteboard interviews and other people are not.


> it isn't like Indians aren't treasured already

“Indian origin CEOs exist, so we can say derogatory things about the race as a whole”


Would you please stop perpetutating this flamewar? You've made your point with 17 comments in this thread alone. That's quite enough—this is not a place for repeating the same arguments over and over, which only feeds them.

The GP obviously broke the site guidelines by tossing in casual flamebait in a way that was guaranteed to be inflammatory, but if the rest of you had followed the site guidelines yourselves, by flagging the comment instead of posting dozens of replies and blowing it up into a completely off-topic flamewar with 100+ comments and counting, the damage would have been minimal instead of extreme.

Also, we've had to ask you about exactly this sort of thing in the past. That's not cool.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


> Context matters. History matters.

More than that it seems outrage matters. That's what you are trying to do here.


I'd say the phrasing is casually racist. I hear nasty shit said about "white men" near-daily these days and I think of it in the same terms. Do these people think or mean to be racist? Maybe not, but it really doesn't matter.


Agree it’s the same thing! Two wrongs don’t make a right. Others behavior does not excuse my own. In this instance we are not talking about white men though so to use that as a counter argument would be plain whataboutism, but I understand you have not done that and have blasted casual racism altogether. Fair enough, and I agree.


I feel we all have regardless of nationality. And I commend you for standing up to casual racism its disappointing to see this on HN but unfortunately very common here.


I may have worked with ‘under skilled’ developers in the Netherlands (but not really), but I’ve never worked with someone that I would describe as bottom-of-the-barrel (if the barrel is world sized).


Downvoting for continued violation of HN rules around best interpretation, and worst interpretation.

This type of low effort fault finding is very unsociable.


[flagged]


Dehumanising is like the below link[1] where someone compared migrants to cockroaches[1]. Calling someone's software development skills "bottom of the barrel" is not dehumanising unless you think that only Silicon Valley software developers are real valid humans and everyone else subhuman.

[I'm not defending the bottom-of-the-barrel Indian devs comment, that did sound racist to me].

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/katie-hopkins...


I guess that's a literal interpretation but the OP's comparison serves the same purpose. It's sad that he has an edit option where he can clarify/correct to phrase it differently if he chooses to but continues to have it stay the same.


There's shit developers everywhere. No need to call out people from a specific culture as being worse on average.


Nobody said that Indian developers are worse than average. Just that there is a big difference if you take cheap Indian developers instead of expensive Indian developers in terms of cost per head, which is why you say that you picked the cheapest Indian developers. Not sure why you would read that as if Indian developers are worse, it is really hard to read it that way. I guess people here just react because it is fun to react, but it really just reads as if they picked the cheapest among Indians and no how Indians relates to other groups at all.

And by Indian developers most likely they meant developers stationed in India and not ethnic group, as location is the main degerminator of cost. So the description was for the cheapest developers you can find in India.


> No need to call out people from a specific culture as being worse on average.

Agreed, it would've been fine if they just left out "Indians" and "Western" the original comment.


But then the running cost wouldn't make sense. The cost of having 200 tech people around is way above $5 million if most of them aren't stationed in a low cost country like India.


[flagged]


[flagged]


Please don't troll HN that way. We ban accounts that post abusively like that.

Perpetuating the flamewar in the first place is already against the site guidelines. No more of that, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I don’t think the need will arise again so I shall not. The evidence is already well apparent and I doubt I have to repeat it. Would you have said anything to that top comment if those who observed the racism stood silent? If the only mechanism to control it is to participate in the flamewar, then that is the mechanism that will manifest.

Not out of a cynical exploitation of it, but merely from memetic selection. You won’t see me there because I prefer being not banned, but the behavior will likely persist among others.


I'm not making a racist judgement here. There are good and bad developers of all races and from all countries!

To be conservative in my financial estimates, I made the assumption that chess.com's technical workforce is mostly made up of less accomplished developers, and, orthogonally, of those in areas with a low cost of living. If I said "bottom-of-the-barrel Silicon Valley devs", I would have estimated their costs 3x higher, but I wouldn't have become racist against Californians.


I think you meant to say “cheapest” developers. Forget about location. Cheapest in the world. Obviously, the managers need to be able to interact with them reasonably well, so this is a constraint that likely raises the costs.

Using this article [1] mining information from payscale.com, I found that the lowest hourly rate for a junior developer can be found in Alexandria, Egypt for about a dollar an hour.

Maybe the article is wrong, but I’d love to see data here. Objectively, India has improved relative to other countries, so we should expect that some locales in Africa could take the “lowest cost dev” title by this point.

I think you can avoid the racist appearance of your original comment by stating the actual objective, the resolution of which changes over time.

[1] https://devoxsoftware.com/blog/average-software-developer-ho...


Your analogy does not hold water because there is not an existing stigma you’d be playing into if you had said that. Lack of sensitivity towards racism doesn’t excuse you from being racist.

And it’s ok. Mistakes happen. I think all anyone is looking for here instead of excuses is just a “didn’t realize my wording there, apologies,” so that we may all give the burden of the doubt and move on with our lives. Instead, by denying acknowledgement, it just drives the wedge further.


[flagged]


The phrase you’re focusing on is taken out of the larger context, which was estimating the lower possible bound of expenditure on staffing. Bottom of the barrel means the lowest quality / cheapest of a given option, which in this case would be the lowest-bidding team of engineers from a low cost of living country, and the combo of those 2 often is India. It’s a reference to the way middle managers think about cost reduction and not the OP’s feeling about Indians.


Yes, I understand English and semantics. I still disagree with the derogatory phrasing. The intent could've been phrased in innumerable alternative ways, with various other words and idioms and phrases.


Pray, give us an example?

If you switch ‘Indian’ devs out for ‘third-world’, you are just expanding the scope of your ‘racism’.

People keep turning up everywhere lately getting offended over every little thing.


Please continue with the worst interpretation possible.

It makes it easy for moderators to cue on those that are not adhering to HN rules.


Gotta love HN down voting this comment that gets to the crux of the problem in OP's original comment. Just goes to highlight the subconscious biases that a lot of predominantly Western devs have when they are totally cool with throwing around language like that without realizing why or how it is problematic.

Some examples of phrasing that would have worked just as well:

- Low-cost developers

- Unskilled, inexpensive developers

But that doesn't quite have the ring of some good ol' casual racism/stereotyping that everyone can pile on I suppose.


> - Unskilled, inexpensive developers

Would have gotten exactly the same backlash if he said "unskilled inexpensive Indian developers". You just show here how unreasonable you are. The developers being stationed in India is very important for the comment, since then you pay much less for them, and then you pick the cheapest among the developers stationed in India, hence "bottom of the barrel Indian developers". There is no racism at all embedded in that statement.

> But that doesn't quite have the ring of some good ol' casual racism/stereotyping that everyone can pile on I suppose.

What? "Bottom of the barrel" has no racial connotations at all, you can use it in any scenario.


> There is no racism at all embedded in that statement.

The phrasing and sentiment, which non-Western people are subjected to time and again, are racist.

Your "semantics-based" explanations AKA opinions do not change that.


"Bottom of the barrel devs on the cheap" capture what you want to say without pointing to a specific geographic area or ethnic group, fwiw.


No it doesn't. When you say "bottom of the barrel devs on the cheap" people would assume you pay American prices, so $70k a year or so. Location matters a lot.

And when making estimates you need a real value, so taking a real location where we know what cheap developers costs helps making the estimate more realistic.


You are aware that there are innumerable developing (colonised) countries that are low-cost, relative to developed (colonising) countries right? India is only one of them.


Right, he could have used many other examples, but he took one which he knew what the developers are paid in and went with it. What is wrong with that? You need to use some number for your example. If he knew a location with cheaper developers he would have used it instead.


This sub thread is a demonstration in triggeredness run amok.

By pointing to a specific region or country, it entirely changes the cost factor on the bottom of the barrel. That's so obvious as to be quite obnoxious that it would require explanation.

Which bottom of which barrel are you talking about? Germany's bottom? The bottom in the US? Russia? Ukraine? China? India? It's hyper relevant and entirely reasonable to state the location for that reason, given the dramatically different economics involved (~10x-20x cost difference in bottom of the barrel labor). It also changes the development cost context as well as the overall cost factor, if the labor is local vs foreign.


From experience, lots of Indian IT firms are far worse than any other company I’ve worked with. Wipro and Infosys.

Criticizing Indian developers in these IT shops is simply the truth. So you can weasel your way about political correctness or just simply admit to the reality. Doesn't mean that Indian developers are bad. Quite the opposite probably - I have several Indian friends and they know how these IT firms are and they openly criticize them.

That said, I would also call out Chinese suppliers and American food. That’s not racist. Has not a shred of racism.

Disappointing to see racism accusations on HN. Every culture has its pros and cons. They’re not some sanctity that is immune to any sort of criticism. Most people here have double standards - criticizing American culture!? No problem. Encouraged.

You know why this wokeness is a problem? Next time someone in your company wants to hire a terrible Indian IT firm, people will accuse you for being racist when you oppose this decision. It has serious implications on day-to-day business, and I would extrapolate to the society in general.


Very well said and sad to see it being downvoted.


I didn't take it as a statement on the average Indian developer, just on the extremes, the variance.

I personally have no trouble asserting that the worst Indian developers are worse than the worst American developers without making any claim about average quality. There is a large cohort of developers in India and other third world countries whose main exposure to programming concepts is poorly taught classes with sometimes hundreds of students to an instructor for instance. That kind of thing simply does not exist in that capacity in the west. Minimum wage laws and such are also a contributor here, people of such poor skill are simply not employable in the west because the price floor for employing someone is so much higher.

None of this has anything to do with race or ethnicity, only societal wealth and development inequalities.


> There is a large cohort of developers in India and other third world countries whose main exposure to programming concepts is poorly taught classes with sometimes hundreds of students to an instructor for instance. That kind of thing simply does not exist in that capacity in the west.

Boy do I have news for you


[flagged]


I have no skin in this debate, but the companies I have worked for simply see a line item on their budget they can shrink after a product has been built. They use a small team of western devs to build and launch something and they go "Why do we need to pay this team to sit here and fix bugs??". They move the team somewhere else and hire an offshore team to manage the project. Project runs fine until something crucial needs to be fixed or a new feature needs to be added. Thing gets duct taped together until the project collapses. Repeat ad infinitum.


> but the companies I have worked for simply see a line item on their budget they can shrink after a product has been built

These Western companies are almost always led by Western people. Surely, they could use their supreme knowledge and avoid this situation, by taking the decision to not hire underpaid/unskilled developers?


They just see dollars.


Have you actually worked at a company that outsources part of their workforce to India? The workload of the remaining local workers often increases considerably to make up for the mistakes, some of the work has to be redone entirely, directions have to be spoonfed to the outsourced teams to get any kind of result. This has been my experience and that of many people who have had the misfortune of experiencing that sort of outsourcing at their workplace.

Western companies often take short-term counterproductive actions to decrease their costs at the cost of product quality and long-term viability, it's nothing new.


[flagged]


Please refrain from ascribing a negative motive, or "casual racism", to someone with whom you disagree, and violating HN rules in the process.

You are digging yourself a deep hole.


It has nothing to do with racism. I can confirm, having worked with them, that a lot of cheap outsourced developers are incredibly bad software engineers, and India happens, for various cultural, economic, and historical reasons, to produce a lot of cheap outsourced developers. (For example: being a large, poor country with unusually high English proficiency relative to most other large, poor countries).

It’s also true that some of the very best and brightest developers I’ve worked with have been Indian. Usually they are working for high salaries at famous companies, not for outsourcing firms. “Race” has nothing to do with it.


> Surely you could think of a better adjective

There’s nothing wrong with Bottom of the barrel. It’s describing the work done, not the nationality of the workers.

> the bottom of the barrel The cheapest, worst, or lowest quality. Used to describe an item in a range of comparable products. [0]

If all software companies were in a barrel West highest cost at the top and lowest cost at the bottom, even the worst quality local companies would be somewhere in the middle. They just can’t compete with the labour cost of overseas developers. If you’re looking for something to be produced at minimum cost, you’re literally looking for bottom-of-the-barrel.

It has nothing to do with racism. If India’s economy exploded overnight and the cost of labour went up 10,000%, North American businesses would look elsewhere. If American developers could be paid $3/hour tomorrow, we would hire those developers but still call any American writing code at that price “bottom of the barrel”.

[0]: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/bottom+of+the+barrel


You can also read the post as “out of all Indian devs (who on average tend to be cheaper than devs from most other countries), hire the bottom of the barrel”. I doubt they meant that all Indian devs are bottom of the barrel.


I try to assume good intent, but I found it hard here considering the phrasing


I found it easy.


I found it hard as well.


Really easy for me, didn't expect to find a handful of HN commenters injecting racism into such a benign phrase.


> Surely you could think of a better adjective than "bottom-of-the-barrel" to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company?

I (not op) agree that the issue is with the offshoring structure and practices. My experience with offshoring is that the devs are given tasks without context and not allowed to make decisions at higher level, are thus unable to “own” a project beyond the micro tasks.

Also, often write code which is not cohesive with the whole, do not take (are not given) time to learn the appropriate APIs and do not communicate when confused.

For me this exposes structures that put people under pressure, punish mistakes and perceive questions as lack of experience.

This has little to do with ethnicity and much to do with colonialist thinking and exploitation.

Coding sweatshops cannot produce deep thinking and the level of ownership needed in a development partner.


Really? How is "bottom of the barrel" racism? You seem to have chip on the shoulder.

> .. to describe humans (Indians) that are intentionally hired at the lowest possible wages, by Western managers to maximize profits for a Western owned & led company?

Well people are mostly hired intentionally. Whether at top of the line and highest wages or bottom of the barrel lowest wages.

Also maybe you are not that familiar with India, you'd be surprised to know what are "lowest possible" wages in India instead of just lower wage by western standards.


Its not racism, I'm an Indian and I agree, you just get what you pay for. If you pay like that of a starbucks barista, that is the quality of devs that you'll get.


"Bottom of the barrel" here might not mean "intrinsically incapable", but rather "agreeing to work for lowest wages in the industry". These can as well be students.

With the cost of living in India being so much lower than in the US and even eastern Europe, Indian developers is probably the least expensive option for those who is looking for people who can actually code and speak decent English. No racism here, just unequal distribution of life standards.


So by your own admission they hired the lowest possible cost developers. What do you think bottom of the barrel means?


I share your disappointment but am happy to see the top upvoted reply calling it out.


Downvoting for violation of HN rules around best interpretation, and replacing it with worst interpretation.


Should move away from France, over 50k in taxes!t


Yeah but think of all the the sleepless nights they'll avoid not fearing for lack of healthcare.


There are other decent countries not named the United States to choose from with lower cost structures than France (which has among the highest in the world). The parent didn't say to move away from France and to move to the US.


I'm talking about organization/corporate taxes

French taxes $4,352.94 $52,235.29 Accountancy $430.00 $5,160.00 Independent Audit $500.00 $6,000.00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...


JVM and then probably Cassandra as DB. Had they used something other than Java, it would've costed 10% of what it does. A rewrite may make sense.

I don't use Lichess. If I did, I would have donated. But after knowing that they throw money down the sink like this, I would be hesitant.


Yeah, sure.

Maybe you could rewrite it in assembler over the weekend and run it on a Raspberry Pi, right?

I worked on Java codebases that absolutely squeezed every bit of performance from a machine and that would be very hard to do in other languages.


I too looked at the infrastructure list and wondered.

While I know many people are saying don't look at the cloud costs, when I look at those numbers it makes me think of CAPEX vs OPEX trades, and the OPEX here is non-trivial, but potentially a variable offset by some labor costs. I think some of this is being driven by a dated tech stack and technical debt.

Now, I am not one to trivialize the work that may need to go into getting this efficient, but I think you are right, we should consider investing into modernization of the stack.


Considering Java and JVM power some of the highest performance server and HFT on the planet. Tell me about the language or ecosystem that give you 90% cost savings?


Fine, please do rewrite this in the language of your choice and use postgress/mysql as DB and lets see if it can handle the HN traffic which is not really that huge. Waiting for the Show HN post.


Tell us, this language 10x more efficient than Java, what is it?


[flagged]


Hosting is under 70k a year. You can get good sysadmins for under 35k/year? Minus the actual costs of hosting?

420k a year is the total for the organization. It includes salaries, administration, etc.

Cost breakdown: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...


Just because you are using AWS/GCP/Azure doesn't mean that you don't need sysadmins. They are called DevOps engineers then.


I scaled my SaaS pretty far with no sysadmin nor Devops, nor any plans to acquire either. I know enough to setup some cloud servers, but I’m not qualified to manage barebones Linux at scale. The hacker news go rent a Hertzer trope is rather tired. If it was better, why aren’t more people picking it?


The type of people that colocate or generally avoid the cloud for cost reasons in my experience don't overlap a lot with the "I write blog posts about everything I do" crowd.


Because often someone else is paying for it (organization/investor/government) or the money cannot be used for something else. Another common reason is as a way to circumvent internal politics.

In my experience, whenever someone actually had to "foot the bill" for the AWS premium, your argument that the cloud is cheaper overall came under a very heavy scrutiny, including justifying those extra "9s" that increase administration effort.


The budget lists system administration cost at $12,875.29. Presumably that's not a full-time sysadmin. And there's no line-item for a devops engineer.

So administration costs aren't zero today, but I suspect they'd be higher if they moved off the cloud.


25% for site administration and moderation.


judging by the datacenter names in that spreadsheet they are hosting at OVH and most of the money already goes into salaries: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Si3PMUJGR9KrpE5lngSk...


Based on datacenter names they seem to be hosted by french provider OVH, not google nor aws


You need at least three admins to have 24h availability. I highly doubt you can save money by selfhosting at Lichess size.


Hosting on the cloud does not magically make your availability issues go away.


No, but they make many availability issues Someone Else's Problem.

When EC2 goes down, I need to maybe wake up and log in to see what happened. I see that all of us-east-1 is down (again), notify everyone involved: "It's down can't do anything, it'll come back up when AWS engineers get to it" and go back to bed.

I can check up on it again during office hours.

If this was a colocated server, I'd need to drag my ass out of bed and drive to the site to see what's up.


Drive to a colo? Most colos have 'remote hands' where you can have an onsite tech do stuff for you. There's also OOB management tools you can use (assuming the hardware isn't toast).

AWS is really expensive if you have the skills to managed hardware yourself.


Remote hands are expensive, and in my experience in using them at DC's all over the world, they're also not very competent certainly not to the point of being able to diagnose and fix issues for you. The best you could hope for with them is normally having them get OOB working so you can do most of the work yourself, and maybe try to swap some hardware if you can provide them documentation on EXACTLY what to do.


Remote hands are often contracted from online marketplaces for such people. I do this occasionally as it's easy money. We do exactly what you tell us to do without any insight into why we are doing this. My objective is to be on-site for 15 minutes and get you back into your equipment. It occasionally takes up to 2 hours to just get past the datacenter security. The most useful docs are a series of pictures on your equipment with labels. It is also helpful to tell us how to safely disconnect uncommon connectors.


See that last sentence there. You have to pay to get those skills, that's why Amazon can charge for it.


Well, we're also at a position where "You won't be fired for using Amazon". Suggesting colo at all gets you the same looks and derision suggesting PostgreSQL used to.


It makes the availability issues largely someone else's problem.

If YOUR server(s) go down for whatever reason, you're getting up at 3am and driving to the data centre to put the fire out assuming you know how to troubleshoot the issue (lets face it, most Devs probably don't since its not their specialty), and have the means of fixing it (failed RAID card? Hope you've got a spare). Then theres the headache of when the data centre is on the other side of the world - get ready to cough up hundreds of dollars to wake up remote hands, and try to get them to do the work for you (probably pretty poorly).

If AWS goes down at 3am, you simply roll over, go back to sleep and have another look when you wake up.

Of course this does all depend on the software, cloud infra being built sensibly but the same also applies for "on-prem" solutions as well.


There is plenty hybrid approaches. You can have cloudflare loadbalaner and enough redundacy to roll over and go to sleep. I think you would have less outages with dedicated hardware than aws control plane. For some compute or IO intense workloads it would make sense to self host.


You can outsource administration for rented severs.

Pretty much any outsourcing shop you hire will be able to do basic Ansible and monitoring and DBA tasks.


Look at the link. They are co-locating at OVH (or running dedicated servers). Which is as close to self-hosting as I can imagine.


Four, actually, if they are to have off-work days.


> Maybe stop using aws or google cloud?

Or, maybe start. Would at least be worth looking at to see if [the equivalents of] spot or reserved instances, Lambda's, Cloud Run, or other serverless etc. might save some money.


People don't realize how efficient a colocated server is. There's a few websites sending about half a petabyte a month of data and are spending far, far less than these hosting costs.


> Maybe stop using aws or google cloud?

That would save them $179 per year.


Don’t forget the $0.56! It’s almost $180/yr of frivolous cloud spend they could shave off…


Are they actually using AWS/GCP for their servers? Lichess.org's IP address seem to belong to OVH.


He should take a better salary and figure out a more viable business model. Running it this way is a risk to its future.



It's the minority of the total spend, but it seems the hosting costs are too high.

For example, they are paying $266/month for 16 thread 128GB 3.8TB SSD, but you can rent a better machine for 99$/month from Hetzner (AX61-NVME).

They are also spending $40k/year on "data protection services" (?!?) and 60k for "site moderation" (they could instead not moderate or rely on third-party forums and messaging services they don't need to moderate).


Everybody complains when someone gets inexplicably/stupidly banned by an AI and there are no humans to review it. Spending money on moderation by actual skilled people is how you solve the problem. This is one place I’m very happy to see them not skimping.


>$40k/year on "data protection services" (?!?)

I'm guessing this is paying an employee/consultant to ensure they are compliant with everyone's policies. At that scale you have to care about every jurisdiction and letting the one dev guess at compliance might not be ideal.

> 60k for "site moderation" (they could instead not moderate or rely on third-party forums and messaging services they don't need to moderate).

Can you even just not moderate? There's some stuff you legally have to due to say NetzDG for German users, and compliance with everyone else.


> (they could instead not moderate or rely on third-party forums and messaging services they don't need to moderate)

Have you ever used the site? How does that work by not moderating? When I report someone for being racist, spamming or submit a game where I think someone cheated... who handles that, what forum or open service doesn't have some type of moderation and in this case were you want a seamless experience with your app as they do with chat, blog, forum and multiple daily tournaments.


[flagged]


You can go one step further and drive the costs to zero by outsourcing not only the social aspects, but the chess games as well!


Have you considered that having a pleasant, well-moderated community is part of the draw (and, perhaps, even an explicit goal) of lichess? Such things are apparently expensive to run.


"How to save money" by HN

Remove moderation, and hence the entire discussion forum. Why would lichess users ever want that? They might as well go to a different website, instead.

/s


Play chess?


This would just push people to play on Chess.com


"they could instead not moderate or rely on third-party forums and messaging services they don't need to moderate" at that point, you might as well not run the service. moderation isn't optional if you want a healthy community.


Some of those pricing seems strange, for example, OVH listed its Dedicated server Rise-2 [1] as US$ 80.92 ex. GST/month with 12 month commitment. Which is the same spec as their socket frontend listed as $110. There are other places like YoloDB and Insight with only 12 Threads. The same E-2136 Intel CPU with 64GB Memory is listed as $173 per month in the spreadsheet, while it is US$ 143.14 ex. GST/month 12 month commitment.

But yes generally speaking OVH is a rather strange breast. Much prefer Hetzner. A Zen 2 64 Thread, 192 GB Memory and 3.8TB SSD DB Primary listed as $464.00 in the spreadsheet only cost about $210 on Hetzner.

[1] https://www.ovhcloud.com/asia/bare-metal/rise/rise-2/


If it's French (as people have suggested elsewhere), the VAT rate is 20%.

$143.14 x 1.2 = $172

Assuming it applies, some of those numbers more or less work out.


OVH has unmetered bandwidth, which is kinda important considering how many games they are showing you at any one time.

Hetzner has 20TB which can be easily done in a day. Can't find their pricing, but everyone usually charges $0.01/GB, which can add up quick.


Not for their dedicated servers. For dedicated servers bandwidth is unmetered

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

Also for their shared servers or servers with 10GBs nics they charge $1/TB when metered that is $0.001/GB you are off by a order of magnitude

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/px62


Hetzner is much smaller and have really few locations... They basically host everyting in germany or finland.

OVH also has way better anti DDoS. https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/anti-ddos/


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