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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

#331

Post by wallace_f »

mattmaroon wrote: post #126
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…

$200k, including benefits, employment taxes, etc. is probably more like $150k in salary. It's not at all egregious for good programmers. I've had employees make near that in Ohio and have friends in the field who make considerably more. Also it's a budget, so I suspect it's intentionally padded to a small degree. While prices haven't converged on SV everywhere, it does have a ripple effect.

The human cognitive measure for egregious pay is not: Pay > Marginal Utility to Humanity, otherwise there's millions of jobs that provide Pay > MuH or even where Pay > 0 > MuH, and I don't hear people complaining about that fact very often. If you look at it through this assumption that compensation should be provided in exchange for providing a benefit to the world, complaining about LetsEncrypt dev salaries begins to look ridiculous.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#332

Post by SilasX »

ceejayoz wrote: post #325
SilasX wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure those figures are something your employer is okay with being shared here?

Google's publicly held. You can find out a lot more than that tidbit in their public filings with the SEC.

But not specifically a job title's internal expectation of fully-loaded cost or willingness-to-pay. You can find salary and benefit aggregates, sure, but that's not the same thing.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#333

Post by rabidrat »

daeken wrote: post #298
rabidrat wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this extensively, and it's actually not that easy to set one up yourself. For one thing, the overhead required to administer a trust is non-zero, and would be prohibitively expensive (non-sustainable) for a small amount. The barest minimum endowment is at least $10k, and possibly $100k. Best case, you find a way to align the trust with a university, who adds it to their portfolio and administers th…

How does the overhead scale when you go from, say, having $10k in the pool to $10m? If a service existed that ran a trust where you could put in money and then dictate where your share gets routed, would this overhead keep going up dramatically as it grows?

The overhead is nearly constant with respect to the number of dollars. But the cost goes up linearly with the number of shareholders (as each one needs at least a modicum of attention over time, to update records reflecting changes of dispensation, or to verify death certificates, etc). And the costs also go up with the complexity of the trust, e.g. if the money has to do anything other than being held and dispersed at appropriate times. (Someone has to file the taxes).

Banks often employ someone called a Trust Officer, who handles things like this related to the trusts that the bank is managing (and carrying). They make around $30/hour. And let's say that 100 people each put in $1000, or $100k total. At 3% interest, the fund would generate $3k/year. If each shareholder requires an hour of the trust officer's time over the course of the year, then all income from the trust goes to pay the trust officer, and there's nothing left over to be dispersed.

It sounds like a good idea, and I'd definitely take advantage of the service if it existed. But lawyers and accountants have to be involved, and they want to be paid. And they're expensive.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#334

Post by ausjke »

ersii wrote: post #312
ausjke wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is nothing really that is free beer in the world, the money has to come somewhere, either some "rich" guys donate the fund, so the rest gets a free ride, or everybody pays a little, say, $5 per year, what's wrong with that? I'm not a rich guy per se, but I want to pay reasonable fee for what I got.

You can still do so by donating 5$ per year or any other amount you'd like - which is awesome! More things should come around in this way. Talk about being inclusive.

yes but if you do the math since not everybody is paying whoever donates need pay more to take care of those who does not, which is really what the whole topic is about.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#335

Post by Fogest »

nkassis wrote: post #210
Fogest wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I am a Canadian who lives in Canada and I disagree. So that's why I don't get your argument? I know plenty of very skilled people here.

But you gotta admit a lot of recent grads end up leaving. I'm another Canadian who left given I was offered doubled my salary in one move.

But isn't the cost of living also higher and you have medical expenses and things? Are you actually taking home double as much, or does a lot of that extra have to go to living expenses that you wouldn't have in Canada?

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#336

Post by aioprisan »

Anasufovic wrote: post #262
generalledger wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to put words in the parent commenter's mouth, but I think the implication was that they would need to make up for NOT having a stock plan.

Netflix level pay would seem about right to me.

So, double? $400k loaded? I'd buy that.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#337

Post by throw2016 »

There is no problem with being located in sf but I would take issue with the idea its a job that 'requires' one to be located in sf or have access to the absoute 'highest quality' of engineers.

On the contrary there is a risk of adding complexity where none is needed because super high quality talent requires super high quality work and if the work of generating certs is not challenging enough, complexity is created, like Acme.

I am not sure why generating a cert is so involved with letsencrypt. Does Dns validation, file validation or email validation require a new standard. Perhaps a simple rest api and web frontend would be better.

Here is my domainname, my cert request and a file on my server or dns entry to verify, now can I have a cert please? This is the process. Why does it need a client, and one that can automatically update certs!! and an elaborate new standard? There is no way I am running this on a live server, so the automation is then moot.

I would rather pay $20-40 a year than babysit my ssl every 90 days, and this is for a wildcard.

The kind of folks who automate things spend hundreds of dollars a month on aws or gce, and willingly pay 10 times more for bandwidth than they would at do or vultr. Is $20 a year or $2 a month per wildcard domain in this context really an issue? So who does the automation target and benefit?

For others a manual process would have been more accesible, there are tons of others things to do with one's time, le is automated but that is one more thing to monitor and that can go wrong.

I can't help feeling the whole cert generation process could be simplified and artificial restrictions around 90 days and wildcards re-evaluated. That would be valuable to users, contribute to make running things simpler and money well spent.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#338

Post by robryan »

autotune wrote: post #230
nappy-doo wrote: post #49

Fascinating. Everyone here is complaining that 2M for 8 employees seems steep, but I think this seems really cheap. Admittedly, I work at Google, but we bat around the number of 400-500k per employee when discussing them here. 250k/ in SV seems really reasonably priced in comparison.

400K per employee at a 32.7 billion dollar company is a vastly different ratio compared to spending ~250K per employee at a start-up with limited funds.

Both are competing for the same talent. Also in the Let's Encypt case there are no stock options to make up the difference with the big tech companies.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#339

Post by nzp »

callesgg wrote: post #235
maker1138 wrote: post #57

They are not paying $250k per employee. You have to factor in payroll taxes, paying accountants to keep books and CPAs to do taxes, benefits, and a multitude of other regulation-imposed payroll costs. All of this is to support salaries of around $125k - $150k. The same goes for pretty much any employer. If a fast food restaurant hires someone at $8/hr, it actually costs them around $16/hr to hire the employee. In a f…

In Sweden the head of state earns less money than the average Let's Encrypt employee.

Good, since LE employees are actually providing value to the world.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#340

Post by ashitlerferad »

zachlatta wrote: post #63
vowelless wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can say that I'd consider myself lucky to get such a team for such a great price I am concerned that they might be being underpaid for doing the type of work that they are. Let's Encrypt is not only a great service, but an important one too. I assume they have a good stock plan to make up.

Since they're a project of the Linux Foundation, they most definitely don't have any sort of stock plan – since you can't have equity in nonprofits.

LF is more of an industry consortium than a nonprofit public interest charity.
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