The marginal cost of a certificate is very close to $0.00, the same as a TXT record in a DNS server. As you've realised, the reason they cost "real money" meas

The marginal cost of a certificate is very close to $0.00, the same as a TXT record in a DNS server. As you've realised, the reason they cost "real money" measured in dollars is because of rent seeking[1] by a few large corporations. These guys have sufficient clout to (mostly) snuff out any upstarts. For example, their response to Let's Encrypt was to start pushing CAA records for "security". You guessed it: the security in that context is not referring to your IT security, but to their revenue security. Similarly, Microsoft Azure has CA integration... with the two biggest for-money certificate authorities. There is virtually no chance they'll ever willingly integrate with Let's Encrypt or add support for the generic ACME protocol because there is no margin on free. There's not much that can be done to fight this, but there are options. As you've said, DNS name servers and CA functions need to be combined. It's almost gibberish to have these as separate services in 2022, since practically everything uses TLS, which needs both to act in concert. In fact, DNS-based traffic management, static DNS, dynamic DNS, DHCP, IPsec management, and CA services should all be combined into a single executable. This way back-end machines could enroll in certificates at the same time that they get their IP addresses. Their IP addresses would be registered under their name, and load balancers can add their IPs to service pools. Etc... Microsoft almost did this right, with LDAP + DHCP + DNS + Enterprise PKI being mostly integrated, but not quite. Keep in mind that the era when these things "had" to be separate services was when DNS needed a dedicated bare metal machine for performance. These days the DNS zone of a large corporation fits in L2 cache and can run out of a fraction of a CPU core! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking