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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

#51

Post by JshWright »

Mc_Big_G wrote: post #40
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…

"plus two full time staff that are employed by other entities (Mozilla and EFF)" So, that's 10. $206k/employee The accepted amount of benefits & costs per employee is around 35%, so now we're at $134k/employee. This is not a high salary for an engineer in San Francisco. In fact, I'd say it's pretty damn low.

LE isn't paying for the staff coming from Mozilla and EFF. The 2.06m is split across 8 people, not 10.

EDIT: Per a follow up tweet, the staffing is expected to increase to 10 in 2017 (presumably plus the two from third parties), so it is /10, not /8, but not for the reason you described.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#53

Post by the_duke »

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 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)

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#54

Post by Swizec »

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 live in SoMa, and I'm not complaining. But statistically speaking my household is an outlier. $250k/year for a household puts you in the top 1.5% in the country[1]. That's probably top 5%-ish for San Francisco. That means that for every 5 households that make this much, there are 95 that don't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#55

Post by jaas »

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…

Going to repeat this comment here since people are doing the math: That's for ten employees, not eight. Salary + benefits.

Could have been more clear in the post initially, but we have eight employees now and have budgeted for ten in 2017. I added a sentence to the blog post to make this more clear.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#56

Post by RyJones »

jedberg wrote: post #45
johansch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to be in Silicon Valley?

They don't (and in fact I think they are mostly remote) but they still have to compete with it.

Correct. LF has a small office in the Presidio, with perhaps a half dozen people living in SF proper and another dozen in the greater Bay Area. The rest of us are scattered around the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#57

Post by maker1138 »

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 free market Let's Encrypt could probably cut its expenses to close to half what it's at now.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#58

Post by 0xmohit »

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?

To put in other words, if one considers donating a fraction of what would have been charged by any other certificate authority then we can be sure that LetsEncrypt would be able to continue to create a more secure web for all of us.

Re: What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

#59

Post by GlennS »

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…

I suspect salaries for software developers in San Francisco are just a bit mad. The numbers floating around suggest more than twice what you'd get paid working on hedge fund software in London, which is in turn maybe 3 times more than an ordinary software developer elsewhere in the UK.

(If it makes you feel any better, I earn less than you working as a software developer in the UK.)

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