this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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I think it's a good idea, everyone should be automating this anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 21 hours ago (9 children)

Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year

Not doubting them, but I don't understand how that's possible.

Storing the email addresses and expiration dates takes an irrelevant amount of storage space, even if they had billions of cutomers.

Sending the emails should also not cost thousands, even if a significant amount of customers regularly let their certificates expire (which hopefull isn't the case).

So where are the tens of thousands of yearly costs coming from?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

If they send 2 emails per subdomain per year, that could easily be 10s of millions which would make the cost per email measured in thousandths of a cent. And I could see the number of subdomains being larger by a factor of 10, maybe more.

Another angle: someone with IT experience needs to manage the system that seems emails, and other engineers need to integrate other systems with the email reminder system. The time spent on engineering could easily add up to thousands per year, if not tens of thousands.

I'm guessing their figure is based on both running costs and engineering costs.

[–] Evkob 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

According to their stats page, Let's Encrypt's certificates are used by around 500M domains.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

So sendgrid checking does 2.5M emails a month for $90/month, and if call them the Cadillac provider. More than that you have to contact sales, so I'm still wondering how it's that expensive to them

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