Selfhosted

Let’s encrypt, and any other ACME based certificate of authorities will let anyone without identity verification create a SSL cert that will work in any browser. This creates trust issues with certain clients browsing web. For example my work (50k+ employees) uses Zscaler to evaluate if a website is safe and it 100% will down-votes any site that uses let’s encrypt due to the lack of transparency. Zscaler will eventually block that website from employees if the score falls too low. Having an SSL cert that you pay for gives cyber security, firms - rightly or wrongly - an additional level of confidence that your identity has been verified.

Full disclosure: I use let’s encrypt on all my self hosted docker instances via Coolify which suits my needs. If I were to set up an ecommerce or other site that needs to guarantee trust, I would absolutely use a paid ssl cert.

Personally, I distrust any ecommerce site that uses any free cert. I see paid cert as a commitment to do honest business, as they need to have some records on the CA.

But for a blog or anythings other than ecommerce is totally fine by me.

Note: It is not about security, nor automation, but a show commitment (i.e. buying a cert), largely psycological.

People who have actually relevant use cases with the need for a reliable partner would never use LE. It's a gimmick for hobbyists and people who suck at their job.

If you have never revoked a certificate, you don't really know what you're doing. If you have never run into rate-limiting issues with LE that block a rollout, you don't know what you're doing.

LE works until it doesn't, and then it's like every other free service on the internet: no guarantees If your setup relies on the goodwill of a single entity handing out shit for free, it's not a robust setup. If you rely on that entity to keep an OCSP responder alive for free so all your consumers can verify the validity of your certificate, that's not great. And people do this to save their company $1 a month for the real thing? Even running the shitty certbot in compute has a larger cost. People are so blindly in love with this "free" garbage. The fanboys will never die off