> Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year, money that we believe can be better spent on other aspects of our infrastructure.
Appreciate the honesty (they had other reasons, too! but emails are a pain and expensive at their scale)
LE just isn't interested in maintaining such a service. Sending them money won't make them interested all of the sudden; that money can be spent better on setting up an independent free alternative.
Because companies are for profit usually and any donation they make reduces that profit. That's why open source projects that can offer service contracts, have a easier time getting money from the buisness world, because this is something bookkeeping people understand in the corporate language.
Its not only the service cost, but as they say, it costs engineering hours, which could be spent elsewhere.
Moreover, SSL cert age check should be something you're looking out for, or letting certbot restart your service for you.
> Why not?
Because I believe it is "sickening" expressing how "sickening (...) it is that large companies don't support open source/free initiative" when discussing one of the projects that do global-scale operations purely on corporate and personal donations. Somehow Let's Encrypt themself don't express that sickening in their blogs and websites. They do thank their sponsors, though.
"Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records. As an organization that values privacy, removing this requirement is important to us."
A check to cover the cost of the system would not solve this part of the problem.
I wanted to throw them some (of work's) cash, and... the only two options were "Sponsor", and "Donate". Sponsorship was, uh, wrong for my use-case: it starts at some multiple-thousands of dollars. Donating would be the obviously correct choice, but putting something marked "donation" onto a corporate card would occasion a... Weird conversation, in which "you could have got this for free, but you're choosing to send them money?" would likely have been raised. I went with free, and was sad about it.
Yes, corporate expectations and affordances around FOSS should change - and, I probably could have persuaded my employer that a few dollars a month for Let's Encrypt was the Right Thing To Do, so I'm a little bit of a coward - but LE would make it so much easier if there was a Send Us Money option that looks like a fee for service, rather than a donation. (Maybe being a 501c(3) precludes that? I don't know.)
There's the "Corporate doesn't understand FOSS" problem, but there's also a "FOSS doesn't speak Corporatese" obstacle there, too.
In the end I sent LE $20, or something, of my own money (I've had years of trouble-free use on my media server, and should have before), but they'd have had $5 / month of work's cash for years if they'd made that easier to do.
I still can't find proper data on their financials, but at least below report (page 42) says only 10% of their revenue is donations. And 48% out of total spending is LE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTY-lQ3S1gw
You could instead frame it as a payment for your dependency on the future existence of the FOSS you are using for free.