December 9, 2025
Padlocks and pitchforks
10 Years of Let's Encrypt
The free padlock that secured the web—and stirred a gatekeeping fight
TLDR: Let’s Encrypt turns 10 after helping make secure connections standard and protecting nearly a billion sites. Comments cheer the free, automated “padlock,” roast brand snobs who still avoid it, and debate whether certificate authorities are gatekeepers—peppered with jokes about new 45‑day lifetimes.
Let’s Encrypt just hit its 10-year mark since that first “trusted” digital lock went live, and the crowd is loud. The nonprofit now issues up to 10 million locks a day and is close to covering a billion sites. It helped push secure web traffic from under 30% to about 80% globally, and around 95% in the U.S. Fans gush that it made encryption—aka TLS, the padlock in your browser—“the baseline.” One early comment nails the vibe: “Feels like it’s been around forever.” Builders say they now assume HTTPS (secure connections) by default, thanks to free, automated certificates and ACME (a robot that fetches those locks for you). But the party has drama. One user says their CEO refused Let’s Encrypt because “it looked…”—cue snobbery. Another warns the flip side: encrypted-by-default is great, yet needing a certificate authority’s blessing to use basic web features is not so great, stoking gatekeeping fears. Self-hosters cheer the $50-a-year savings and call it life-changing for blogs and home clouds. And the jokes? Hulitu quips they’re only “45 days old,” nodding to the new 45‑day lifetimes. Ten years in, commenters crown Let’s Encrypt a necessary hero—while arguing who should hold the keys.
Key Points
- •Let’s Encrypt issued its first publicly trusted certificate on September 14, 2015.
- •It is now the largest certificate authority by certificates issued, with ACME widely integrated.
- •Issuance milestones: 1M total (Mar 2016), 1M/day (Sep 2018), 1B total (2020), ~10M/day (late 2025).
- •HTTPS prevalence increased from below 30% to around 80% globally; ~95% in the U.S., based on Firefox stats.
- •ISRG hosts Let’s Encrypt; the project emphasizes HTTPS prevalence over issuance counts as the true impact metric.