Let's Encrypt

Long-term owners

Let's encrypt is easily the best thing that's happened for a secure internet the last 10 years.

Dec 2025 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• ZeroSSLFree ACME certificate service with unlimited certs and wildcard support, often used as an alternative to Let's Encrypt. Critics question its free-tier limits, pricing jumps, and missing company and privacy information.12recommend
• Sectigo certificateA paid certificate authority people name as an alternative to Let's Encrypt and a trusted brand next to DigiCert. Critics point to recent root and intermediate CA incidents and high yearly prices.5recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 311 comments. Each links to the original.

1. its a bit of a palava. I don't have to open port 80 which is nice for ... security audits but gains zero security benefit.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation”

2. Google was able to push these requirements in large part due to Let's Encrypt's success making secure origins ubiquitous.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

3. without paying any money, registering a domain, configuring DNS or disclosing any personally identifiable information

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “WebPKI and You”

4. My personal experience with Let's Encrypt has been that the only hassle is in systems that don't implement automation

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days”

5. I simply ran the script provided by LE, it set everything up, and it renewed every time until I took the site down

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

6. Thanks to LetsEncrypt DNS-01, you can absolutely spin up a production-like environment with SSL and everything.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”

7. That one non-profit has almost single-handedly encrypted most of the web, 700 million sites now! Amazing work.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet”

8. Thanks to Let's Encrypt, otherwise I would have had to manually purchase or apply for a free certificate

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Acme, a history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet Security”

9. You can get a free cert from letsencrypt using their dns challenge. No need to expose to the internet.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “WebTransport is almost here to allow UDP-like exchange in the browser”

10. You could have HTTPS with Letsencrypt, but you need to deactivate Cloudflare when you want to renew

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

11. Let's Encrypt could stop issuing certificates to you, if the administration decided that necessary.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

12. They made TLS the default, so much that you didn't have to keep unencrypted HTTP around any more.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Acme, a brief history of one of the protocols which has changed the Internet”

13. Let's encrypt is easily the best thing that's happened for a secure internet the last 10 years.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

14. once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

15. LE has been an amazing resource and every time I setup a new website and get a LE cert I smile.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

16. There is no technical guarantee that this remains the case indefinitely, only a political one.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

17. Letsencrypt is a great example, it did took away the big money from all these commercial CA's

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “CrowdSec Source Code Leak”

18. it's much cheaper than the prior commercial operators had been for much more value delivered

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare was down”

19. you should use Let's Encrypt, since paying for a cert from some other CA does nothing useful

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown”

20. The short lifespans are to encourage people to actually automate, not just say they want to.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Let's Encrypt is adding two additional remote perspectives for domain validation”

21. Irks about the renewal squeeze aside, I still think it was a net positive move for the web.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

22. LE has been really great, particularly in running hobby web sites on the public internet.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

23. It’s a stupid policy. To solve the non-existent problem with certificates, we are pushing the problem to demonstrating that we have access to a DNS registrar’s service portal.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

24. as soon as you transact with a sanctioned entity, you are globally in breach of the agreement and risking the revocation of all your certificates

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]”

25. LE uses multiple viewpoints to resolve the challenges, so you need to open your internal DNS resolvers/HTTPS to basically all the world.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

26. Lets Encrypt hasn't even existed for a full decade yet. During that time it's dropped support entirely for the original acme protocol.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “What's on HTTP?”

27. Free providers have limits and this new time limitation will also play into that as there will be many more certificates to renew.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

28. Think about what would happen the day that letsencrypt is borken for whatever reason technical or like having a retarded US leader

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “.de TLD offline due to DNSSEC?”

29. The same let's encrypt that recently removed support for using their certificates in clients because Google told them to?

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Veracrypt Project Update”

30. I don't need to create any new and operationally unnecessary attack surface to prove that I control the domain.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

31. a service that could be forced by EO to revoke foreign certificates is the backbone of so much of the internet

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Let's Encrypt has been down most of today”

32. These short certificate lifetimes make Let's Encrypt a central point of failure for much of the Internet.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

33. You don't do breaking changes like this without giving your 'customers' a chance to stick to their ways.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

34. They don't have your private keys and their "level of access" is equivalent to any other certificate authority that your browser trusts.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

35. There is a sea of difference between something like Google/Facebook/TikTok and Let’s Encrypt/the Linux Foundation/FSF/etc.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “SSL Configuration Generator”

36. Let's Encrypt also provides value by providing signed TLS certificates that are enrolled in all major operating systems

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Upcoming changes to Let's Encrypt and how they affect XMPP server operators”

37. New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

38. has become one of those pieces of critical Internet infrastructure that just quietly hums away in the background

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Lets Encrypt Stopping Issuance for Potential Incident”

39. Most every modern "big company" I have worked for is leveraging LetsEncrypt in some capacity where appropriate

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

40. The most radical thing LE did was not to provide free certs, or even automated certs, but short-lived certs.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Let's Encrypt is adding two additional remote perspectives for domain validation”