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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

#151

Post by hiddenkrypt »

jakewins wrote: post #136

I wish there was a way to donate money towards a fund - like, give $100USD, that goes into some index fund, and then LetsEncrypt withdraws $3.50 (as per https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates ) a year until the sun burns out. I'd much rather spend my money knowing its a small ways toward making this kind of thing self sustainable.

You could set such a thing up yourself. It's basically a trust. Put your money in the index fund, and have a process to automatically withdraw the safe amount and donate it.

Now build a product around that idea, and be the next patreon. I heard of this great company that'll help you get ssh certs for free.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#152

Post by jcoffland »

imron wrote: post #124
jcoffland wrote: post #91

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.

Have you seen their sponsors page? Multiply the cost of the various sponsorships by the relevant sponsors and I think you'll find they're doing alright. That doesn't even take in to account individual donations either. The point of this post was not just fundraising, it was because they believe in transparency and openness.

It reads like, oh shit, if you don't donate we might not be around next year.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#153

Post by bkanber »

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…

Your 30k salary costs your employer around 50-60k (I don't know the deal with your benefits and payroll taxes and all that).

Rule of thumb in the US is that you add about 40% to a salary to get the total cost to the company to support that salary. And that's just taxes and basic benefits. Add a pension and 401k with matching, and it goes higher.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#154

Post by bkanber »

tjohns wrote: post #73
vtlynch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why there would be 100% salary overhead? This seems quite high as a non business owner/operator.

Taxes, health care, other insurance (disability, etc.), and other benefits (401k, etc.) are a significant fraction of the cost to employ someone. These things are not cheap. The standard overhead is (I believe--correct me if I'm wrong!) anywhere from 25% to 100%, depending on your base salary and how competitive the benefits package is.

At our company the overhead is about 40% of the salary, and could easily reach 80-100% with bigger and better benefits packages.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#155

Post by Matthias247 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #108
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.

Short term contracts might be different, but 95% of normal software engineers in germany will e.g. never reach 100k. Including those in the large corporations. I think 200k might be barely in reach for a senior manager. In other countries/regions this will even be far lower.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#156

Post by jakewins »

hiddenkrypt wrote: post #151
jakewins wrote: post #136

I wish there was a way to donate money towards a fund - like, give $100USD, that goes into some index fund, and then LetsEncrypt withdraws $3.50 (as per https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates ) a year until the sun burns out. I'd much rather spend my money knowing its a small ways toward making this kind of thing self sustainable.

You could set such a thing up yourself. It's basically a trust. Put your money in the index fund, and have a process to automatically withdraw the safe amount and donate it. Now build a product around that idea, and be the next patreon. I heard of this great company that'll help you get ssh certs for free.

It'd be a stellar price list:

- $100: Donate $16,100,000,000 ($3.50/year for 4.6 billion years)

- $200: Donate $32,200,000,000 ($7.00/year for 4.6 billion years)

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#157

Post by ryanobjc »

Fogest wrote: post #134
ryanobjc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably not. the best canadian coders are already here in the US.

Says who?

Says a Canadian who lives in the US who overgeneralizes.

It's not entirely true, but its way closer to the truth than you'd admit.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#158

Post by dragonwriter »

sndean wrote: post #141
secabeen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Here at UC, the non-salary costs can be in excess of 60% of salary.

And in the federal govt it's at least that percentage... Anecdotally, in one department within the DoD, it's ~90%, which sounds insane.

> Anecdotally, in one department within the DoD, it's ~90%, which sounds insane.

If you consider how little uniformed military personnel are paid and how high the other costs associated with them are to start with, I'm actually not all that surprised that somewhere in some specialized area in the DoD this ratio is reached.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#159

Post by ryanobjc »

rrdharan wrote: post #127
toomuchtodo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you can be more charitable in reading the GP's point; I certainly didn't interpret it the way you did or see it as a statement that high caliber people only live in SF or other high cost of living spaces. It was a response to the claim that "there's no reason for them to be in SF" which is an odd assertion. The point is that comparing an actual team with a purely hypothetical one is really just an exercise in…

Exactly.

The reality is everyone is playing armchair quarterback/back seat driver/whatever and telling LE about that they COULD do. As if somehow LE was dedicated to overspending. As if they didn't scour the earth to find the people and save 25-50%.

Building a good team is hard. Building a good distributed team is harder. That they exist is just as much luck as anything else.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#160

Post by jitix »

dstroot wrote: post #112

Offering an alternative viewpoint. Many seem to be focused on the cost/FTE. The alternative view is that if this was a business then $3m a year to run it is "peanuts" for the services provided. In fact I prefer the for profit model. I'd like them to charge for each account/cert to cover their costs.

The whole point of Lets Encrypt is not to charge people for the certificates. But I agree that the amount they are spending per year is very modest compared to what they are doing.
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