Why Lichess Works When Most Donation Models Don’t

Lichess is one of the rare corners of the internet that feels calm, fair, and built for the player. No ads in your face. No pay-to-win. No “growth hacks” trying to keep you scrolling. Just chess, open source, and a community that treats people like adults.

That leads to a natural question:

Why do only a small percentage of users donate when most people use Lichess for free?

This post is not a guilt trip. Free access is the mission. If you never donate, you are still part of what makes Lichess worth building. The goal here is to explain why some people choose to donate anyway, and why this model is both powerful and surprisingly hard to copy.

1) First, a reality check: the “Lichess anomaly” and survivorship bias

Lichess and Wikipedia are famous examples of donation-supported systems that work at scale. But it is important to say out loud:

They are statistical outliers, not the norm.

For every project like Lichess, there are thousands of open-source and community projects that slowly fade because:

- maintainers burn out
- donation momentum is unpredictable
- recurring costs keep arriving whether donations do or not
- gratitude and “good vibes” do not consistently turn into operational funding

Donation-only funding is notoriously unstable for the vast majority of projects.

Why Lichess survives is not only about ideals

The philosophy matters, but so does something more concrete:

Lichess is extraordinarily efficient.

Its operating costs are unusually low relative to its user base because of strong engineering decisions, technical efficiency, and meaningful volunteer and community contribution. That is a real technical and operational achievement.

If you try to copy Lichess’s funding model without similar cost discipline, the math often breaks.

2) The key misconception: donors are not “paying for everyone” in their own minds

From the outside, it can look like a few people are covering everyone else. But most donors do not experience it that way.

Their internal framing is usually closer to:

“I want this public good to exist. I’m helping keep it available to everyone.”

That framing matters because it changes the emotional tone from resentment to stewardship.

This is the same reason people support:

- Wikipedia
- public radio
- open-source libraries used by millions

They are not buying access. They are supporting continuity.

3) Who donates? Three common donor patterns

A) Heavy users who feel they have received a lot

Some donors are heavy users who have played for years and improved a lot. Their mental math is simple:

“I’ve gotten far more value than what a typical subscription would cost. Donating feels fair.”

This is not “paying for others.” It is a kind of personal moral accounting.

B) Value-aligned supporters

This group donates even if they are not heavy users.

They donate for what Lichess represents:

- no ads
- no manipulation
- no pay-to-win
- open source
- clean governance norms

They are paying for principles, not perks.

C) People for whom the cost is small and the impact is large

For some users, $25 to $100 a year is not a big decision. It is meaningful to the platform and low-friction for them.

They optimize for something like:

“What outcome do I want in the world per dollar?”

4) A correction worth making: “donation vs predatory” is a false dichotomy

It is tempting to contrast donation-based platforms with a caricature of the for-profit world as purely manipulative.

Sometimes that critique is accurate, especially for ad-driven products that monetize attention and behavior. But it is not always true.

There is a huge ecosystem of honest, transactional commerce where paying feels fair:

- buying a coffee
- subscribing to a tool you love
- paying for software that clearly does what it promises

So the real divide is not “donation good, profit bad.”

The real divide is:

consensual value exchange versus manipulative extraction.

Lichess is admirable because it stays on the respectful side of that line.

5) The agency effect is real

Donation systems can unlock generosity because they preserve agency:

- You choose.
- You can stop anytime.
- Nothing bad happens if you do not.

When people do not feel squeezed, they often become more generous.

Still, we should not romanticize this.

Agency helps, but agency alone does not reliably pay bills for most projects.

6) Why this does not collapse into resentment

In many systems, “free users” create tension. In Lichess, they usually do not, because free use is explicitly part of the mission:

- most people will not donate
- that is expected
- the platform is designed around that reality

This removes the moral policing dynamic. It keeps the community healthier.

Where resentment does show up in open source

In the broader open-source world, maintainer burnout often comes from a different kind of free riding:

large corporations using free code at scale without contributing back.

That is where resentment tends to accumulate, because it feels less like a community commons and more like value extraction.

7) The hard truth: the money is cleaner, but usually smaller

Donation funding often has high moral quality. It feels clean.
But the quantity is usually lower.

People sometimes say donation models are “efficient,” but efficient for whom?

- Efficient for users: you pay what you want.
- Often inefficient for the platform: it captures less value than it creates.

Most open-source projects do not fail because they are not valuable.

They fail because they cannot reliably capture enough funding to sustain the value they create.

Lichess is unusual because it combines:

- massive value creation
- unusually controlled costs
- strong trust and clear values

Most projects only have one or two of those.

Final synthesis

A small percentage of users donate because:

- they feel gratitude, not obligation
- they care about keeping Lichess available to everyone
- they like being treated with respect rather than being pressured
- they want at least one place online that is not built to manipulate them

And the bigger takeaway is this:

Donation-supported platforms can work, and when they do, they create something rare.
As beautiful as the philosophy of free and open source supported by donations is, it rarely becomes reality at scale. In many domains, the incentives and economics simply do not line up for long enough. Costs rise, attention shifts, maintainers burn out, and the model collapses long before it becomes stable. Most communities do not get a lasting example of it working without compromise. Chess does. And that makes Lichess feel less like a website and more like a rare public good worth appreciating.