Let's Encrypt has issued billions of free certificates, and for a large share of the web it's the obvious choice. So why does anyone still pay? Because the two products overlap less than the marketing on either side suggests. Free and paid certificates encrypt traffic identically — the real differences are validation level, lifetime and renewal workload, wildcard mechanics, rate limits, warranty, and support. This guide walks through each one so you can decide on facts rather than habit.
In short
If you need encryption on a public site and you can automate renewal, Let's Encrypt is a perfectly good answer — we say that as a company that sells certificates, and we run a free Let's Encrypt-based service ourselves. Paying makes sense when you need something the free model structurally can't provide: verified organization identity (OV/EV), a warranty, vendor support, longer-lived certificates with fewer renewal events, or bulk issuance beyond Let's Encrypt's rate limits.
The comparison at a glance
Let's Encrypt | Paid (commercial CA) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | From a few dollars to $150+/yr by type |
| Encryption | Identical | Identical |
| Validation levels | DV only | DV, OV, and EV |
| Lifetime today | 90 days (6-day option) | ~199 days (200-day cap) |
| Wildcard | Yes — DNS validation only | Yes — any validation method |
| Rate limits | Yes (e.g. 50/registered domain/week) | No per-week caps |
| Warranty | None | Relying-party warranty included |
| Support | Community forum | Vendor support |
Lifetimes and limits as of June 2026; both are scheduled to change — see lifetimes below.
Where free and paid are identical
Start with what doesn't differ, because this is where most of the bad sales copy lives. A Let's Encrypt certificate and a paid DV certificate produce the same TLS handshake, negotiate the same cipher suites, and earn the same padlock in every major browser. Browsers don't render free certificates differently, and Google's HTTPS ranking signal doesn't know or care what your certificate cost. If someone tells you a paid certificate gives you "stronger encryption" or "better SEO" than Let's Encrypt, they are wrong on both counts.
Both are also publicly trusted in the same sense: they chain to root CAs that ship in browser and OS trust stores, and both are subject to the same CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements and Certificate Transparency logging. A free certificate is not a second-class citizen of the PKI. The honest comparison starts after encryption, with everything wrapped around the certificate.
What Let's Encrypt gives you
Let's Encrypt is a nonprofit CA (run by the Internet Security Research Group) built around one idea: certificate issuance should be automated and free. You prove control of a domain through the ACME protocol — an HTTP file, a DNS TXT record, or a TLS challenge — and get a domain-validated certificate in seconds. Clients like Certbot, acme.sh, and Caddy handle renewal on a timer, and our Certbot and ACME automation guide covers production setups in depth.
The catalogue has grown beyond basic certificates. Wildcards are supported (DNS validation only), and since January 2026 Let's Encrypt also offers generally available 6-day "short-lived" certificates and certificates for IP addresses. That's a genuinely strong free offering — for a blog, a side project, an internal tool, or most small-to-medium sites, it's hard to argue with.
The structural trade-offs are just as concrete. Certificates last 90 days, so renewal automation isn't optional — a broken cron job becomes an outage within weeks. Issuance is rate-limited (most famously 50 certificates per registered domain per week), which matters for platforms issuing certificates across many customer subdomains. Validation is DV only: nothing about your organization is verified or asserted. And when something breaks at 2 a.m., your recourse is a community forum, not a support contract.
What a paid certificate adds
The clearest paid-only feature is verified identity. OV and EV certificates embed your organization's vetted legal name after a human verification process — something Let's Encrypt's automated model can't do and doesn't plan to. Banks, healthcare providers, and procurement departments often require it. If that's your situation, the question isn't free vs paid but OV vs EV.
The rest of the paid bundle is operational. Commercial certificates currently run about 199 days against Let's Encrypt's 90, meaning roughly half the renewal events — which still matters for the appliances, load balancers, and legacy systems where renewal is a manual change window rather than a cron job. Wildcards can be validated without touching DNS automation, then exported and reused across servers. Multi-domain (SAN) certificates scale to hundreds of hostnames without weekly rate limits. You get a relying-party warranty and an actual support channel. And one vendor can cover adjacent needs — S/MIME email certificates, code signing — that Let's Encrypt simply doesn't issue.
None of that changes the encryption. You're paying for identity assurance and operational convenience, and the honest pitch for paid certificates is exactly that. If you want to see what those trade-offs cost in practice, current SSL pricing starts at a few dollars a year for paid DV certificates and rises with validation depth.
Certificate lifetimes are converging
For years, "free means renewing every 90 days, paid means once a year" was the sharpest line between the two. That line is dissolving. Under the CA/Browser Forum's Ballot SC-081v3, the maximum lifetime for every publicly-trusted TLS certificate dropped to 200 days on March 15, 2026 — which is why commercial CAs now issue 199-day certificates — and the cap falls to 100 days in March 2027 and 47 days in March 2029.
Let's Encrypt is moving in parallel: it has announced a phase-down from 90 days to 45, with an opt-in 45-day profile from May 2026, a 64-day default in February 2027, and a 45-day default in February 2028. Read those two timelines together and the conclusion is unavoidable: within a few years, everyone renews frequently and automation is mandatory regardless of what you pay. "Paid lasts longer" is a real but shrinking advantage — buy a paid certificate for identity, support, or issuance scale, not to postpone automating renewal.
The real cost of "free"
Free refers to the certificate, not the operation of it. A production Let's Encrypt setup costs engineering time: installing and configuring an ACME client, wiring DNS API credentials if you need wildcards, monitoring that renewals actually fire, and owning the failure mode when they don't. For a team that already automates everything, that cost rounds to zero. For a small business whose "ops team" is whoever set up the website, an expired certificate taking the site down on a weekend is a real and common failure — one bad incident can cost more than a decade of paid certificates.
Paid certificates carry the opposite cost profile: money instead of time. A DV certificate costs a few dollars a year; OV typically runs around $30–$100 and EV roughly $50–$150+, with the price buying human vetting rather than better crypto. The right comparison is never "free vs $X" — it's "whose time, and whose 2 a.m. problem." A managed free service like My-SSL Free splits the difference for simple cases: Let's Encrypt certificates with renewal handled for you.
Which one should you use?
- Blog, portfolio, internal tool, dev/staging, most small sites — and you can automate renewal (or use a managed service)? → Let's Encrypt. Paying adds nothing you'd use.
- You need a verified organization identity — compliance, procurement, a sector where buyers check? → Paid OV or EV; the free model can't do this at all.
- Renewal is a manual change window on appliances, load balancers, or systems without ACME support? → A paid 199-day certificate halves your renewal events today — but start planning automation, because everyone's lifetimes are shrinking.
- You issue certificates at platform scale, or you want wildcards without DNS automation, a warranty, or a vendor on the phone when something breaks? → Paid, for the operational package rather than the certificate itself.
- Still unsure? Our step-by-step chooser walks the same logic across every certificate type, including wildcards and multi-domain.