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Comment by beeker87 | Hacker News Reader

Just want to say, I'm not affiliated with LE, but I think it makes a lot of sense to donate to them if you use their services regularly.

From my own use case, integrating TLS for my site via LE and the autocert package in Go has been seamless. It's completely free (if you want it to be), and it looks like I won't have to worry about renewing certs anymore. The service LE is providing is amazing. Just thinking of the millions of dollars they're collectively saving everyone, yearly, is pretty crazy.

If anyone at LE reads this, thank you for your work!

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Yes! At my job I've setup a per-paycheck donation to LE because they have saved me so much time (apache, nginx and caddy automagic SSL) and in the long run it'll probably still be cheaper than buying one of the SSL certs from the other companies.

It sounds like your company should be the ones donating! Kudos to you either way and I agree, with how easy this has become compared to other solutions I have no problem donating to them.

That's the great part, my company matches my donation!

Our company made a small donation of $25 per month. https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

It is a small token of how much time they saved us from setting up ssl for our clients. These small monthly donations can add up help them thrive in the future.

That's wonderful! How does your company write that off? Is it a business expense? I know a lot of companies don't really care to "donate" for various reasons, am wondering why your company is so willing when it is not required.

Maybe LE should set up subscriptions for some small service (priority support?), just to give companies a deductible reason to donate.

This. Everything is easier with an invoice; Accountants and tax inspectors are always suspicious about donations with only an email as a confirmation. It's a point patio11 already made in the past about OSS.

I fully agree, which is why I set up a recurring donation for what I would otherwise pay to some commercial certificate authority. LetsEncrypt is doing great work!

What's crazy to me is that their crowdfunding campaign [1] has only raised $100K so far, considering what they're doing.

1: https://www.generosity.com/community-fundraising/make-a-more...

Which Go package do you use?

You can probably get pretty far with the package written by Russ Cox:

https://github.com/rsc/letsencrypt

No, that is a bad idea, see: https://github.com/rsc/letsencrypt/issues/15#issuecomment-25...

He said "autocert", which is https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/acme/autocert

Sorry just saw this, it's the autocert package bradfitz linked to.

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