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Comment by apeace | Hacker News Reader

This is a no-brainer for any LetsEncrypt user:

  - Take the amount you paid for certificates last year
  - Divide by any number, let's say 10
  - Donate that amount to LetsEncrypt, and continue to get free certificates all year!

I agree with some commenters that it would be great to see LetsEncrypt bolster their revenue with reasonably-priced offerings such as wildcards and EVs. But you can't argue with the progress they've made so far. If there is enough community demand, I'm sure they'll get there.

Though their stats page[0] appears to be broken, last I heard they had surpassed 5 million certificates. To meet their current funding goal of $200k for a month, that equates to $0.04 per certificate per month, or $0.48 per certificate per year!

EDIT: Their stats page is back. Looks like they have reached 10 million certificates. So halve the above numbers!

[0] https://letsencrypt.org/stats/

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Thanks for your support!

I'd also like to point out that even if you never get a certificate from us yourself we're still helping to protect you when you browse any of the millions of sites we help to secure.

How much money does LetsEncrypt receive from monthly reoccurring donations?

I need to preface this by claiming I have no idea what I'm talking about, but please bare with me:

The startup I perviously worked at paid around USD 2000 for 5 wild card certs from GoDaddy.

if Let's Encrypt charged even 10% of that, it's about $40/cert. Based on your estimate of 10 million certificates issued (and assuming that 90% of the users leave because it's not free)...that's ~1 mil certificates @ $40/cert => $40 mil.

Am I calculating this wrong somehow? (or how it this possible?)

Let's Encrypt doesn't charge anything for cert issuance; the 10% figure was someone's suggested donation based on being appreciative of cost savings. It's true that if Let's Encrypt did begin to charge $40 instead of $0 for certs, and maintained even a moderate percentage of current issuance rates, it would have revenue in the millions of dollars.

(Also, Let's Encrypt doesn't issue wildcard certificates at all.)

If I divided what I paid last year by 10, I'd donate 90¢ :)

I've never paid for an SSL cert :/ Also, keep in mind that I'm just issuing them like they're peanuts now, because LE is there. Need to deploy a throwaway instance of my app? Random subsubsubdomain and a TLS cert, why not.

You can't really compare the number of free things you're using to the number of things you'd use if they weren't free.

Yeah, same here, while I had a cert, now I encrypt all my personal self-hosted stuff just because LE makes it free and easy (and this last part is not to be underestimated!).

The stats page appears to work for me. It shows the certificates jumping from 5M to 10M in the month of October.

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