21 ms·

Why would they?

• bryanlarsen 9y ago
  They would if they ran out of money. There's a donate button at the bottom of the post...
  • kristofferR 9y ago
    LetsEncrypt has, as the post said, a super tiny (compared to their massive positive impact) budget of just $3 million dollars and the largest companies of the web as backers. They're never gonna run of of founds - their backers (Mozilla, Akamai, OVH, Cisco, Google, EFF,++++) would never let them.
• hinkley 9y ago
  I could see a situation where, for instance, they do a security audit and are convinced that they need to significantly up their physical or network security to prevent a potential attack. There's also the possibility of their competitors pushing an agenda with standards bodies that pushes up the cost of PKI to try to freeze them out. If they charged a token amount I don't think it would be so bad (except for the whole getting it through the bean counters problem), but it would be more lucrative for them to charge people money for raising the rate limits in their system. Certain people like Akamai are charging exorbitant amounts to manage large numbers of SSL certificates. Just look at their quarterly revenue, it's insane. Other providers could partner with LetsEncrypt and undercut them substantially enough that they could steal customers, but it might mean LetsEncrypt has to scale up their operational limits to do so.