Comment by altvali

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.