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I've been working on a rollout of LE for our platform that I'm honestly now thinking about pausing -- a crowdfunding campaign is the opposite of confidence-insp

I've been working on a rollout of LE for our platform that I'm honestly now thinking about pausing -- a crowdfunding campaign is the opposite of confidence-inspiring in terms of longevity. Any chance LE can make some official statement regarding their operating budget/burn? My strong preference would be to use them but I can't recommend transitioning to someone trying to make up single months of Opex by begging for donations.

no_protocol 10y ago
What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt Sep 20, 2016 https://letsencrypt.org/2016/09/20/what-it-costs-to-run-lets-encrypt.html https://letsencrypt.org/2016/09/20/what-it-costs-to-run-lets... On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541383
jaas 10y ago
Diversifying income is something every responsible non-profit should be doing, and that's what this is. If I were you I'd be more worried if we didn't do something like this. The bulk of our support comes from corporate sponsorship, another component is grants, and the third is individual donations. Individual donations are likely always going to be our smallest source of revenue but it's still an important source to develop. We'll be around. Go ahead with your rollout, I hope it goes smoothly and that it inspires you to contribute back what you can.
- magila 10y ago
  Although it's not really intended for this sort of thing, I wonder if you could shoehorn Let's Encrypt into Patreon. If you're just trying to diversify your revenue it seems like Patreon would provide a more predictable cashflow than doing periodic crowdfunding campaigns.
  - seeekr 10y ago
    They could just offer a simple subscription (yearly or monthly) with user-chosen price tag, aka recurring donation. Call it "individual sponsorship", make a pretty login window and a little dashboard once logged in, that's it. Like if we had to pay for a subscription to use LE, except we don't need to.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Yes! Patreon, Paypal, anything that has the ability to give a recurring donation. If they can get 20,000 people giving $5 a month then they have half their recurring costs. This is something I would consider giving at least $5/mo to along with wikipedia, united way, NPR, etc. Some efforts are just worth giving money to and recurring donations would be a lot more stable and valuable (even if smaller up front) than a one time $200,000 fundraising.
  - bobjob 10y ago
    Thats what you can via Paypal from there donation page ... And thats how they get 0.50$ every month(it is a small private, non profit site, otherwise it would be more).
rgbrenner 10y ago
I think that's being too cautious. We're also working on a rollout, and won't be pausing it. It costs $3m/year to run it (someone already posted this link). Take a look at the sponsor cost: https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ And their sponsors: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ They already have at least $2.4m from the 10 platinum and gold sponsors. And at least $270k from the 27 silver sponsors. That's the minimum total, and we're already close to the $3m. Plus it's part of ISRG, which is backed by Akamai, Cisco, Mozilla, EFF, and a few others. It sounds very unlikely they'll fail to raise the $3m they need any time soon. I think they'll need some kind of other event to occur first before that happens -- like a security breach, or getting removed from the browsers.

no_protocol 10y ago

What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt Sep 20, 2016 https://letsencrypt.org/2016/09/20/what-it-costs-to-run-lets-encrypt.html https://letsencrypt.org/2016/09/20/what-it-costs-to-run-lets... On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541383

jaas 10y ago

Diversifying income is something every responsible non-profit should be doing, and that's what this is. If I were you I'd be more worried if we didn't do something like this. The bulk of our support comes from corporate sponsorship, another component is grants, and the third is individual donations. Individual donations are likely always going to be our smallest source of revenue but it's still an important source to develop. We'll be around. Go ahead with your rollout, I hope it goes smoothly and that it inspires you to contribute back what you can.

magila 10y ago
Although it's not really intended for this sort of thing, I wonder if you could shoehorn Let's Encrypt into Patreon. If you're just trying to diversify your revenue it seems like Patreon would provide a more predictable cashflow than doing periodic crowdfunding campaigns.
- seeekr 10y ago
  They could just offer a simple subscription (yearly or monthly) with user-chosen price tag, aka recurring donation. Call it "individual sponsorship", make a pretty login window and a little dashboard once logged in, that's it. Like if we had to pay for a subscription to use LE, except we don't need to.
- daveguy 10y ago
  Yes! Patreon, Paypal, anything that has the ability to give a recurring donation. If they can get 20,000 people giving $5 a month then they have half their recurring costs. This is something I would consider giving at least $5/mo to along with wikipedia, united way, NPR, etc. Some efforts are just worth giving money to and recurring donations would be a lot more stable and valuable (even if smaller up front) than a one time $200,000 fundraising.
- bobjob 10y ago
  Thats what you can via Paypal from there donation page ... And thats how they get 0.50$ every month(it is a small private, non profit site, otherwise it would be more).

rgbrenner 10y ago

I think that's being too cautious. We're also working on a rollout, and won't be pausing it. It costs $3m/year to run it (someone already posted this link). Take a look at the sponsor cost: https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ And their sponsors: https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/ They already have at least $2.4m from the 10 platinum and gold sponsors. And at least $270k from the 27 silver sponsors. That's the minimum total, and we're already close to the $3m. Plus it's part of ISRG, which is backed by Akamai, Cisco, Mozilla, EFF, and a few others. It sounds very unlikely they'll fail to raise the $3m they need any time soon. I think they'll need some kind of other event to occur first before that happens -- like a security breach, or getting removed from the browsers.