Change to donations system

Hi all!

lichess needs your help. As you may know, our only income is donations, since we refuse subscriptions and advertisement.

To encourage and reward donations, we setup a new system: the Patron account.

It's similar to a premium membership, except free members still have access to all features. Because you know, this is lichess, and we want the best for everyone.
See the humorous feature matrix there: lichess.org/features.

Until now, just making a single donation was granting the donor status forever. That is no longer the case.

If you make a single donation on lichess.org/patron then you get the Patron membership for one month.
In order to retain the glory of the Patron account, one needs to support us on a monthly basis.
Just like a subscription model.

Because we are grateful to all players who donated, they have been granted one month of Patron membership. But at the end of the month, they will be downgraded to free accounts.

Patron membership can be obtained from lichess.org/patron.

So if you like lichess, want it to remain free, and are excited about fast feature development, please support us!

Cheers,
Thibault

Awesome! So, if I donate 5$ once, I'll get "wings" for 1 month if I understand correctly? For example, Jul 20 - Aug 20?

That is correct!

Get your wings. Redbull gives you wings!! But not BBQ wings sadly. Thanks @thibault

Sounds like a nice idea. Perhaps also show the wings in the recent forum posts section as appropriate? A little incentive but I also think it'd just look neat as well.

Now I have to donate every month for cool kids club.

First of all: thank you and everyone who contributed work to this great site. I hope the new donation system will work out for you and that all the running costs will be covered by donations. I know that it's a non reasonable financial burden for a single person to keep a big site like this alive.

I don't even mind if you will receive some additional money every month. You guys deserve it.

But it comes with some downsides too. Although I'd like to, a monthly donation is not possible for me. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one. I've considered the players who donated a little more trustworthy because they were willing to give some of their money to support the site. So this indicator is gone after a month for people like me.

The second thing is, that this slightly commercial approach of the donation system is a little less transparent. As far as I can tell, the "progress bar" is gone now. Also the link to the spreadsheet of the monthly server costs disappeared.
This is fully understandable from a economical point of view. Donations may stop or slow down, when the weekly goal is reached. But what will happen with the additional amount of money? (if there is some) Will it be saved for poor months or will it be used to pay people who contributed code?

Please don't think of me as ungrateful. You guys are awesome! And if I got some money to spend, I sure will donate now and then, to support the best of all chess communities available.

Thanks for your insights, scuffi. The link to the detailed costs breakdown will be added tomorrow.

In the meantime, here it is: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CGgu-7aNxlZkjLl9l-OlL00fch06xp0Q7eCVDDakYEE/edit#gid=0

If the donations exceed the servers costs, then I will finally get a salary. After 6 years of hard work.

I'm sorry to hear you can't afford a monthly donation. Note that $1 a month is sufficient to get the patron icon.

And if you don't want or can't do it, then it's no problem really. You're not missing on anything else than an icon.

I don't think the words "slightly commercial" apply, with a features matrix like this one: lichess.org/features

Lichess will never be commercial. Everything is free for all, forever, and without any ads. Now, if the patron system allows me to work on lichess full time, that's awesome - for me and for the site.
But if it doesn't work, then nevermind. I'll find a job, and keep working on lichess on my free time.

Maybe the words "slightly commercial" are a bit misleading here. You are right.

And to be honest, I thought that 5€/month is minimum. I just missed, that I can enter a custom amount :D

Just out of curiosity, why not give the patron icon for a length of time proportional to the amount of money donated for people who prefer larger, one time transactions (i.e. $5 = 1 month, $50 = 10 months)? Alternatively, what about different colored or sized wings depending on how much you donated that month ($1-$4.99 = small icon, $5-$9.99 = medium icon, $10+ = large icon)?