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What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

letsencrypt.org

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Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#101

Post by rmc »

koolba wrote: post #64
mikeyouse wrote: post #26

Funny to see people quibble over a few hundred thousand dollars when they're doing a substantial amount of the heavy lifting to encrypt the web. At over 10 million certificates issued in the past year, their staffing costs represent $0.20/cert. For those who've deployed with Let's Encrypt, did you get a quarter's worth of value from their service?

> For those who've deployed with Let's Encrypt, did you get a quarter's worth of value from their service? The certificate price isn't even the issue. It's the signup + auto-renew! Before LE came out, I would have paid $100 to not have to 1) Not go through the hassle of manually ordering certs and 2) Not having to log back into servers to periodically update them. I get both of those with LE ... the fact that it's fr…

How about donating $100 to Lets Encrypt then? :P

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#102

Post by djsumdog »

Swizec wrote: post #54
jedberg wrote: post #37

To 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…

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…

As others have pointed out, with benefits, taxes, etc the actual salary is going to by way under that.

But I don't see why you're getting downvoted either. The income inequality in places like SV and Seattle/Redmond is insane. People working "normal jobs" struggle to get by and often have to commute further and live way outside the city just to survive.

It gets even more ass-backwards because public transport hubs are way more expensive to live near and, once again, only highly paid individuals can live near them (and therefore ditch their cars potentially saving even more money, where as the not so well off have a car requirement because .. American's transportation failure. And before you give me that "American is too spread out for rail" shit, Russia has three high speed rails and St Petersburg has the 2nd largest tram network in the world).

You're pointing to a very real problem. If there was plenty of housing and transport, those wages wouldn't put the strain they do on every one else. But there isn't and they do. Working remotely would actually be way better because at least they're not in the SV area.

And to rant a little more, a high end engineer that would cost $200k in Washington/California (maybe NYC too) would start at 50k euro in Berlin. They'd top out around 70k euro at the most. Even for really highly skilled positions, Germany tends to have way less income inequality and flats are also way more affordable for everyone.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#103

Post by detaro »

artimaeis wrote: post #100
dublinben wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

CAs require special hardware security modules (HSM) to contain the signing keys and have to control the entire path to them, so yes, you need to own your hardware for a public CA.

And independence from their sponsors is an important organisational feature for Let's Encrypt.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#104

Post by bryanlarsen »

ryanobjc wrote: post #87
the_duke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope they have high caliber programmers and ops people, considering the problem space. Those don't come cheap. Can anyone comment on tax overhead for the company in SV? What net salary do 250k amount to? (net as in minus the tax for the company, not the employees income tax)

There isn't as much as people bitch about, generally speaking you have a few items: - FICA payroll tax - this is US wide, so not really more expensive in CA. - CA state payroll tax, this isn't that expensive, just a few percent. - Workers comp, could be cheaper in other states, but coders/office workers have cheap workers comp. - Health insurance, maybe a bit more expensive in CA Basically hiring people isn't expensi…

Also office space: 100 - 200 sq.ft. per employee * $75/sq.ft. in SF -> $7k5 - $15k per employee.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#105

Post by jedberg »

berns wrote: post #86
jedberg wrote: post #37

To 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…

> Edit: A bunch of people are saying "why not remote". I think they are in fact mostly remote, but they still have to compete with SV wages because really good people command those wages whether they are here or not. This doesn't make sense. In the case of remote workers it's the San Francisco workers that have to compete with global offer/demand because nobody cares how much you are paying for housing.

It doesn't make sense but it is true. If you're really good, someone will make you an offer for an SV salary, and now everyone needs to compete with that. Besides, it's only fair. Your value shouldn't be tied to where you live per se. It's true that people in some areas make less because they have fewer options in their area, but for a high caliber person, they have plenty of options whether they move their physical location or not.

I'm pretty sure we're going to see a trend as remote work becomes more popular where there will be a much smaller delta because of location of the employee.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#106

Post by pyb »

djaychela wrote: post #6

I'm quite surprised - $2.06 on staffing seemed steep, so obviously read on as I was thinking that there must be a lot of employees. But 8? OK, I'm just a teacher, and I earn around £30k a year... not the kind of figures I've seen bandied about on here for graduate programmers who seem to be pulling in 8-10 times that for their first job... So I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the payroll (which I doubt would ha…

Programmers and teachers are not really paid well in the UK !

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#107

Post by datasage »

klodolph wrote: post #72
Swizec wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

To clarify, average $200k per person in staffing costs. Staffing costs > salary.

Yes, depending on the level of benefits offered and local taxes, you are looking at 20%+ cost on top of salary to employ someone.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#108

Post by Spooky23 »

jedberg wrote: post #37

To 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…

Complaining about that is insane.

To put it in perspective, almost any Fortune 500 is paying $200k for a contract Level-2 helpdesk analyst.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#109

Post by ryandrake »

jedberg wrote: post #37

To 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…

> To everyone complaining about the $250K (see edit, it's actually 200K) per person in salary

I don't think people are _complaining_ about it, just expressing surprise/shock. It's one thing to read the anonymous "I know a guy who's brother's roommate makes $300K at Google" comments that you have to take with a grain of salt, but another thing to see an actual company's data. Eye opening for sure.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#110

Post by toomuchtodo »

ryanobjc wrote: post #93
MustardTiger wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I fully endorse Let's Encrypt right to hire people solely from SF, but if you think high caliber people don't live in low cost of living places, you're either uneducated or purposely disingenuous.

EDIT: Source: I work on a fully remote team (>50 people) with teammates around the world who are high caliber people.

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