Our first full year as a live CA was an exciting one. I’m incredibly proud of what our team and community accomplished during 2016. I’d like to share some thoughts about how we’ve changed, what we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve learned. At the start of 2016, Let’s Encrypt certificates had been available to the public for less than a month and we were supporting approximately 240,000 active (unexpired) certificates. That seemed like a lot at the time! Now we’re frequently issuing that many new certificates in a single day while supporting more than 20,000,000 active certificates in total. We’ve issued more than a million certificates in a single day a few times recently. We’re currently serving an average of 6,700 OCSP responses per second. We’ve done a lot of optimization work, we’ve had to add some hardware, and there have been some long nights for our staff, but we’ve been able to keep up and we’re ready for another year of strong growth.
What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
Today we’d like to explain what it costs to run Let’s Encrypt. We’re doing this because we strive to be a transparent organization, we want people to have some context for their contributions to the project, and because it’s interesting. Let’s Encrypt will require about $2.9M USD to operate in 2017. We believe this is an incredible value for a secure and reliable service that is capable of issuing certificates globally, to every server on the Web free of charge.
New Name, New Home for the Let's Encrypt Client Software
Update: Added clarification that only the Let’s Encrypt client software is changing its name and host. The Let’s Encrypt certificate authority and associated services are not changing names or relocating. Over the next few months the Let’s Encrypt client software will transition to a new name, soon to be announced, and a new home at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). This change does not affect the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority (CA) or associated services, which will retain the Let’s Encrypt name and continue to be hosted by the Internet Security Research Group.
Read the Docs 2016 Stats
Congrats, you made it through 2016! Read the Docs has been rolling along, and we’ve had another interesting year as well. For a quick summary: Our level of contributions and commits has gone down a good bit this year., Our traffic and user growth has been quite steady, which is particularly impre...
Encryption + Trust & Safety reading list (updated 2026-05-20)
It's Time To Rethink Everything by @t3dotgg
A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe MTCs are worth pursuing as a key to a post-quantum future. An increasingly urgent problem For much of the last several years, the conversation about post-quantum cryptography has been a conversation about encryption. The reasoning was straightforward: an attacker who records encrypted traffic today might be able to decrypt it years from now once quantum computers can break the underlying math. Authentication, the part of TLS that indicates a server is who it says it is, has been a less urgent problem. A quantum computer needs to forge a signature in real time, not retroactively, so threats to authentication hinge on the existence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC).
Aspiration | Better Tools for a Better World
It's our 23rd Anniversary! Nonprofit staff, developers, capacity builders, and grassroots activists will convene at the 2026 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, 18-20 November, 2026, to share knowledge, build capacity, and collectively envision the future of free, open and equitable digital tools and practices to support social change efforts.
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
An Open Audit
How does a lightweight community Certification Authority ("CA") engage in the heavyweight world of PKI and secure browsing?
20 years in, a "professional" rollout, and only 2k streams. This was my last hurrah and I’m feeling defeated.
325 votes, 326 comments. I’m struggling to process a massive disconnect and need some perspective from other career artists. I’ve been in the…
My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026
How to Survive the Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death
There can be some really exciting days when you’re building a SaaS company, but the large majority are a slog. Just one foot in front of the other, slowly trudging your way up the hill in the muck. The hockey-stick growth you’ve envisioned feels laughably far away. Amazingly, you are growing every month, but it’s just…so…tedious. This, my friends, is the long, slow SaaS ramp of death. It’s perfectly normal and par for the course for the large majority of SaaS companies.
Declaring Systems Bankruptcy
For years and years, I’ve helped teams evaluate their systems, fix their systems, tweak their systems, and evolve their systems. And sometimes it’s even been necessary to help teams declare bankruptcy on their systems, blow them up, and start anew. And now it’s my turn. It started as a slow re
Issue 104 – World Tyranny Financial
As the Trump family’s crypto dealings raise more alarms, crypto enforcement is falling to new lows
Proud to finally share what I've been working on. I'm excited for a future where privacy is normal. encryptedspaces.org
Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps
www.wired.comHi folks, we've received feedback about the pricing for our docs.coop hosting. We've decided to drop the price to £30/mo for a small Docs instance. This comes with an SSO provider (such as Keycloak or Authentik). Hit us up at boop@autonomic.zone if need help deGoogling your office suite!
Autonomic Co-op
We're thrilled to announce our new project: docs.coop! Building on the great work of Suite Numerique (docs.numerique.gouv.fr), we're offering an opportunity to be part of a new collaborative Docs platform as a service, that provides an ethical alternative to Google Docs, Office 365, Notion etc.
