Should you use Let’s Encrypt or buy a paid SSL certificate? Short answer: most modern websites are fine with Let’s Encrypt. But not all of them. This guide walks through when each one fits, in plain English.
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The two options, briefly
Let’s Encrypt is a free certificate authority. Anyone can get a certificate, free, in a few minutes. It is automated end to end - issuance, installation, renewal - and works for almost every public website.
Paid SSL certificates come from commercial certificate authorities like DigiCert, Sectigo, GlobalSign, or SSL.com. You pay a yearly fee. In return you get extra services that Let’s Encrypt does not offer.
Think of it like a driver’s licence vs a notarised legal document. Both are official. One is free and good for most situations. The other costs money and proves more.
What Let’s Encrypt does well
- Free. Zero per-certificate cost. You pay nothing for any number of domains.
- Automated. Tools like Certbot, acme.sh, and Caddy renew certificates without anyone touching them.
- Browser trusted. Trusted by every modern browser since 2015.
- Fast issuance. Minutes, not days.
- Wildcard support. A single certificate can cover all your subdomains.
Where Let’s Encrypt falls short
- Domain Validation (DV) only. Let’s Encrypt verifies you control the domain. It does not verify your organization or address.
- No Extended Validation (EV). If your industry requires the “green bar” experience or organization-level vetting, you cannot get it here.
- No warranty. Paid CAs typically include an insurance warranty against mis-issuance. Let’s Encrypt does not.
- 90-day lifetime. Certificates expire every 90 days. Automation is not optional.
- Rate limits. Generous, but not unlimited. Large organizations sometimes hit them.
What paid certificates add
- Organization Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV). The CA verifies your business is real before issuing.
- Longer lifetimes historically, though browser policy is moving everyone toward shorter terms.
- Warranty. Insurance against mis-issuance.
- Phone support. A human you can call when something is wrong.
- Compliance check-the-box. Some auditors and procurement teams expect a brand-name CA on the contract.
How to choose
Use Let’s Encrypt if:
- You are running a SaaS, marketing site, blog, or API.
- You can automate renewals (you should - it is easy).
- You do not need the OV/EV label.
Use a paid certificate if:
- You are in finance, healthcare, or government and your compliance framework requires it.
- Your customers expect to see your verified company name.
- You want a warranty for very-high-stakes transactions.
- Your procurement process requires a vendor relationship.
A common mistake: monitoring is a separate question
Some teams buy paid certificates partly because they expect the CA to alert them about expiry. That is a weak reason. CAs send email reminders to whoever happened to be in the contact field two years ago - often someone who left the company.
Paying more does not make a certificate safer either. Your CA itself can have a bad day. Certificate authorities, free and paid alike, have suffered outages that blocked new issuance for hours (see real outage stories). And even a perfectly valid certificate can suddenly stop working in Chrome if the root it chains up to gets distrusted (this is happening to several CAs in 2026). None of these problems care how much you paid.
Whichever CA you use, free or paid, the only thing that catches these problems early is monitoring built for the job. It watches expiry, chain health, and trust across browsers, and tells you the moment something changes, not after your customers do.
Your CA will not warn you in time. We will.
TLS Radar monitors every certificate across your domains, free or paid, and alerts your team weeks before an expiry, a chain break, or a trust change can take your site down. Works with Let’s Encrypt and every commercial CA.
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