Let's Encrypt
letsencrypt.org
Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Read all about our nonprofit work this year in our 2023 Annual Report.

Happy birthday to Let’s Encrypt !

Huge thanks to everyone involved in making HTTPS available to everyone for free !

    • RedjardEnglish
      1•1 month ago

      They don’t offer wildcard certs, but otherwise I think they are.
      I wanna say acme.sh defaults to them.

        • RedjardEnglish
          1•1 month ago

          Yes, seems you are right. Not sure where I got the impression.

          Unrelated, when I researched this I saw that acme.sh, zerossl, and a bunch of other acme clients are owned by the same entity, “Stack Holdings”/“apilayer.com”. According to this, zerossl also has some limitations over letsencrypt in account requirements and limits on free certificates.

          By using ZeroSSL’s ACME feature, you will be able to generate an unlimited amount of 90-day SSL certificates at no charge, also supporting multi-domain certificates and wildcards. Each certificate you create will be stored in your ZeroSSL account.

          It is suspicious that they impose so many restrictions then waive most on the acme api, where they presumably could not compete otherwise. On their gui they allow only 3 certificates and don’t allow multi-domain at all. Then even in the acme client they somehow push an account into the process.

          […] for using our ACME service you have to create and use EAB (External Account Binding) credentials within your ZeroSSL dashboard.

          EAB credentials are limited to a maximum per user/per day. [This might be for creating them, not uses per credential, unsure how to interpret this.]

          This all does make me slightly worry this block around apilayer.com will fall before letsencrypt does.

          Other than letsencrypt and zerossl, this page also lists no other full equivalents for what letsencrypt does.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 month ago

            I think if LetsEncrypt went away, so would ZeroSSL’s free offer.

            However, I do think not having limitations on the API is good; automation is good practice and I guess this is a concession to customers /users who have no automation in place (though this is a sad state by now). LE doesn’t offer anything comparable AFAIK.