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Comment by scovetta | Hacker News Reader

If you're paying $200 for an SSL certificate, you're doing it wrong. But I don't think any of the points of the article change for cost > $0.

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Maybe I'm ignorant but $200 a year is not that much money. Considering a software engineer is usually paid 70k a year and you have four engineers you are looking at this being .071428571 % of total cost. So ummmmm maybe minimize your costs elsewhere :p

Some of us live under the federal poverty level, where any sum of double digits or more is significant.

Yes. That is true. You are right.

There's always free certificates like from StartSSL and CACert.

$200 a year should be easily affordable under the US welfare system. Many people on welfare (oftentimes it's fraudulent, but government-encouraged, "disability" these days) make more than minimum wage.

I am making a US-based comparison since you used the word "federal."

$200 certificate for a personal website? That's not necessary. What we need is to stop charging a SSL/TLS certificate so much to get the recommended level of cipher used.

Obviously $200 is cheap compared to a skyscraper or a space station.

Compared to the ~$15 a year a .com domain costs, paying 10x that amount for an SSL certificate seems a bit on the high side.

Exactly, if you want a more secure web, you need a system that is affordable to everyone.

Yeah, I had the same exact reaction. You can purchase SSL certificates really cheap nowadays, and even business ones costs under $100, e.g., here - https://getssl.me/en/ssl-certificates.

You can get Class 1 certificates for free[1].

[1] - http://www.startssl.com/

Not for commercial/business use you can't. That's only for personal sites.

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