This does not instill confidence in Let's Encrypt's longevity. It sounds like a cry for help. $250k may be a reasonable sum for an established company to pay it's employees but for a company to have that kind of burn rate with out having next years funding secured is scary.
What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
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Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 2M staffing budget in 2017 is for ten people, not eight. Was not clear enough in the blog post initially, apologies.
Actually it is for 8. Two of the people are being paid by another company. At least that's what I understood.
It is ten (I made the budget), but I apologize for not making that more clear in the blog post.
We have eight employees now, and have budgeted for ten in 2017.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
250k per employee all-in (benefits, etc) doesn't seem that outrageous being in SF. Plus I'm guessing they're all high caliber employees given the scale of what they set out to do and what they've accomplished with a relatively small team.
"Being in SF" is a silly excuse. There is no reason for them to be in SF.
Except the people already were there, and they want to stay there. The imaginary high caliber people who can do this in a low cost of living place are exactly that: imaginary.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#94To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary (which seems to be everyone at the moment), a few things to keep in mind: 1) That includes benefits 2) They are in Silicon Valley and have to compete with everyone else in Silicon Valley 3) Given what they have accomplished with such a small team, these are probably high caliber people. 4) In SV there is a good 25% premium you…
Would their staffing cost also include office space (even remote companies have headquarters)? Or would that be included somewhere else? Or do they actually not have an office?
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#952m - ~200k in benefits. Looks like 180k per engineer. Thats high, but looks like they've got the corporate sponsors to support those salaries.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in Silicon Valley and I would love a $250k salary. But I also didn't graduate college and incur the immigrant tax. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ What I'm saying is, not everyone gets $250k and the MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME in San Francisco is $90k. If you're not making that much, don't sweat it, you're likely way above median either way. Edit: to clarify further. As an Engineer with a reasonably-employed girlfriend, I still get to liv…
They're not actually making $250k each. Keep in mind that this includes employer taxes and benefits, which add up very quickly.
OK, so $200k in salary then. Still stupendously good. WOW!
Maybe there _IS_ something to all these "I know this guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" threads. It just seems so unbelievable.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#97How many employees does it take to run Let's Encrypt? 8
2 to run the website
1 to ask for money
5 to say "are you sure you need a wildcard cert?"
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#98Can the business model be charging for the certificate directly, just cheaper than others? I'm fine with that.
I'm not. I test a lot of ideas but don't have much money. I have already to pay for hosting and DNS. SSL is optional. I'm very thankful to let's encrypt for the opportunity to use SSL on my sites.
Also SSL (and the web) is a broken technology, I'm not going to pay for something broken.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should consider running the service in Canada, where software engineer / programmer salaries are a third of that
A follow up tweet clarified that it was 10 people and not eight. But even that is a pretty high cost per employee I agree. But the question is: Can you get a team of engineers that have the ability and crypto know-how to build something like Let's Encrypt in Canada for 1/3 of the salary?
probably not. the best canadian coders are already here in the US.
Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt
#100Curious where the 20K a month in hosting is spent? Perhaps Google or Amazon could throw in some credits to help out?
It is almost certainly necessary for them to have dedicated hardware in neutral datacenters. They can't just run their infrastructure on AWS or Google.
Maybe there's something very obvious I'm missing - but why?
If their environments are not bare-metal then moving from a virtual solution to a cloud one seems fairly simple. If they are bare-metal then it hardly seems necessary for issuing certs - but if you have more insight I'd love if you'd share it!