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Let's Encrypt pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt.org) is a domain, DNS or SSL provider. Priced at zero: a nonprofit certificate authority that issues publicly trusted TLS certificates free of charge, funded by donations and sponsors.. Free plan: The whole service is free: publicly trusted certificates issued and renewed automatically over ACME; no paid tier..

What Let's Encrypt costs

  • 1 .com domain: not offered (null: not offered. Let's Encrypt does not register domains, so the ref point has no price.)
  • DNS, 5 domains: not offered (null: not offered. No DNS hosting.)
  • 1 SSL certificate: free (0: free publicly trusted certificates via ACME with automatic renewal, covering example.com and www.example.com (yardstick rule a).)

Prices are USD per month: the headline is one .com domain at its yearly renewal price (not the first-year promo), with contact privacy and any required account plan, divided by 12. We also price managed DNS for 5 domains registered elsewhere at 5 million queries a month and one single-domain SSL certificate for a year divided by 12; a product that does not do a job shows no price for it.

What Let's Encrypt does

Core: API & infrastructure as code, Free automated SSL.

Important: Wildcard & multi-domain certs.

Let's Encrypt price hikes

No price hikes on record for Let's Encrypt.

Alternatives to Let's Encrypt

Other domain, DNS or SSL providers at 1 .com domain at renewal:

Let's Encrypt alternatives: 4 domain, DNS or SSL providers compared, at every size.

Other kinds of products that cover part of Let's Encrypt

  • Vercel (Hosting): covers 69% of Let's Encrypt; missing or partial: Free automated SSL (partly), Wildcard & multi-domain certs (partly)
  • Hostinger (Web & WordPress hosting): covers 38% of Let's Encrypt; missing or partial: API & infrastructure as code (partly), Free automated SSL (partly), Wildcard & multi-domain certs

Sources

Pricing page: letsencrypt.org. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Official site and PricingSaaS (plan captured 2026-06-29) both show a free service with no tracked pricing changes; rate limits come from the official docs. The 90-to-64-day lifetime cut announced for Feb 10, 2027 (post dated Oct 7, 2026) is a validity change not yet in effect, so it is not listed in changes; third-party host fees are not counted.