Let’s Encrypt Effect : Huge Slash of Price of SSL/TLS DV and EV Certificates

It Was Probably Obvious When Let’s Encrypt Project Was Launched. In Reseller Market, There is Huge Slash of Price of SSL/TLS DV and EV Certificates, Which is Up to 70% of Official Price. Official Pricing However, Mostly Unchanged. Additionally, there has been services to deliver DV and EV certificates in Monthly plan like Software-as-a-Service. If you have 4+ old Geo Trust like SSL/TLS certificate like ours and time is ticking to renew, you must be careful to do market survey to buy at cheapest cost.

What This Huge Slash of Price of SSL/TLS DV and EV Certificates Means?

It means success of Let’s Encrypt project. Let’s Encrypt actually offers more security features like we discussed before, we can generate ECC SSL (ECDSA) Certificate with Let’s Encrypt. Actually Let’s Encrypt it great for development sites and technology sites which continuously test many new features of security. A good number of sponsors of Let’s Encrypt project is various CDN services. We are mostly talking around DV TLS certificates.

Whether EV/OV certificates are of real value, that is questionable. Many larger IT companies do not use EV certificate. EV does add a cosmetic beauty of green colored padlock icon and the topic nicely discussed :

The above article also shows how much fallacious the concept – EV certificate clearly for is for the private or public limited company to declare loudly the company’s name beside domain name.

I am carefully avoiding the topic – which country is cheapest to register online bussiness and operate bussiness. Opening Georgia may be cheap but practically UK is too much known to whole earth.

EV does add a strong point that the legal entity as company is valid. We can easily use OSCP (also read how to prevent errors of OSCP Stapling) with free Let’s Encrypt.

Now, the question becomes why with limited security features to a developer, we have to buy Geo Trust DV SSL/TLS certificate? Commercial CAs supply Domain Validated certificates that include a warranty including for wider range of supported devices. When Google uses Geotrust, there is some practical reasons of that part. Oddly, laymen trust Norton’s seal more!

Essentially Let’s Encrypt decreased the need of purchasing lot of paid certificates. In this situation, the paid CA’s resellers has not many options rather than somehow managing special offer to slash pricing by 70%.