Lichess Plans Pricing
Lichess is a free, ad-free, open-source online chess server operated by the French nonprofit Lichess. There is no commercial plan and no metered API pricing. All access to lichess.org and the Lichess API is free of charge. Sustainability is funded by patron donations through the Lichess Patron program, which provides recognition (a visible patron badge) but no functional gating. Both the public dataset exports and the public API are available to anyone at no cost, subject only to rate limits and fair use.
Lichess Plans Pricing is the machine-readable pricing-plan profile for Lichess on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Plans specification.
It defines 2 plans, covering free and donation tiers, with named plans including Free, Lichess Patron.
Tagged areas include Chess, Open Source, Nonprofit, and Donation.
Plans
Full, unrestricted access to lichess.org and the Lichess API for play, analysis, puzzles, studies, tournaments, broadcasts, board and bot play, the opening explorer, the tablebase, the external engine, and bulk dataset downloads. No payment ever required and no feature gating.
- Unlimited play in real time and correspondence across all variants
- Full access to all 185 API operations and ND-JSON streams
- All tournaments, studies, broadcasts, puzzles, and analysis features
- Bulk dataset downloads from database.lichess.org
- Mobile, web, and third-party clients (Board API, Bot API)
Voluntary monthly or lifetime donation supporting Lichess operations. Patron status is purely a recognition tier with a visible badge; it does not unlock any feature or change any rate limit.
- Visible patron badge on the user profile
- Supports server operations, infrastructure, and development
- No functional benefit or rate-limit change versus the Free plan