
Ask YC: Why are SSL certificates so expensive? - andr
http://www.geotrust.com/ssl/wildcard-ssl-certificates/<p>This certificate costs $995 per year. If you think about it, there is very little that the issuer does, other than supposedly validate your ownership of the domain. They don't even need to maintain considerable server infrastructure.<p>So why isn't there no serious competition? Why isn't there a company that issues certificates for $10?
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nickf
I work for a CA, a large public one.

As someone mentioned - please don't equate the cost of the certificate to buy
against the cost of the certificate to produce. Signing costs nothing (well,
ignoring the expensive HSMs!).

Most of the cost is performing the vetting/validation. Then there's support
costs. Then legal costs (insurance, warranties etc). There's often inherent
costs with owning/controlling the root certificates - WebTrust annual audits
just to get in the major browsers, plus any fees that some manufacturers
charge for root-embedding. Infrastructure costs - CRLs and OCSP responders.
CRLs may be tiny files, but we can serve TB a day in a 160KB file :)

Ask any questions - I'll answer as best I can.

~~~
moe
Ehm, excuse me but gimme a break.

Owning a CA is a license to print money - it's as simple as that and really no
need for excuses.

The costs you cite are dwarfed by the profits.

Vetting/validation and support is a fixed cost (support squad), legal costs
can't be too rough (how often is that warranty actually claimed?) and well,
cry me a river about the chain of extortion going up the CA chain. Yeah, it's
really annoying you can't build your own money-printer, you have to rent it!

Honestly, a tiny bit of math sobers me of any pity: 1 million customers, $100
bucks a year. That's a solid one hundred million bucks annually. That kind of
money buys quite a bit of vetting/validation and legal costs. It _might_ even
cover your 30T/month crl-traffic. Barely.

~~~
nickf
I'm not making any excuses. It's just that there's been a lot of discussion
about SSL certs the past few months, and I'm willing to bet there's no more
than a roomful of people worldwide with the knowledge and experience to
understand how to run a CA and the costs associated.

Does your anger extend towards the domain name companies? Webhosts? After all,
running on free software and 'cheap' commodity hardware - Dreamhost probably
make the same figures you're talking about, and they don't have a lot of the
large up-front an annual costs. Just an example, really.

To address each point: Validation - not a fixed cost. Some can take several
real man-hours to complete, and additional costs of access to third-party
databases, translation costs. I see it possible to make a loss on some certs
purely in validation.

Legal costs - insurance premiums for something this specialised are high,
regardless of how many claims made.

CA chaining - as per other comments, you're lookat at potentially $50K a year
just in audit costs, just to get into the mainstream browsers, with a 5-10
year wait to become ubiquitous enough to be commerically viable. You can pay
to get a sub-CA and bypass this step, but it will cost...you can go into 7
figures annually.

Again, I'm not attempting to make excuses. I do agree some certificates are
overpriced. I am just trying to show how the CA industry is no more a 'racket'
or 'license to print money' than many more of the internet-centric businesses
that exist, even though it may seem that way without insight.

Plus, it keeps me gainfully employed :)

~~~
moe
_Validation - not a fixed cost. Some can take several real man-hours to
complete, and additional costs of access to third-party databases, translation
costs. I see it possible to make a loss on some certs purely in validation._

Oh, so if validation is the big factor then why do you make me pay my hundred
bucks year after year? Shouldn't it go down to, say, $10 from the second year
onwards?

Also I have certified quite a few domains for the same company. Thawte
strangely didn't ask us to send n copies of the same paperwork - but still
happily charged the full fee for each cert.

 _Legal costs - insurance premiums for something this specialised are high_

Again. Cry me a river. I have no idea how many customers VeriSign and the ilk
have but the figure must be in the millions. Assuming an average profit per
customer, per year of only $50 (which is probably a low shot) I'm not _so_
worried about your insurance fees.

 _CA chaining - as per other comments, you're look at potentially $50K_

Wow. Assuming one million customers this is almost half a day's worth of
revenue! Indeed, you guys are suffering over there...

 _Plus, it keeps me gainfully employed :)_

I'm not attacking you personally. I just hate being ripped off like that. And
it is a rip-off, no matter how you spin it.

~~~
nickf
Not sure which CA you went with, but we re-validate each time you renew.

I don't know about the premiums or your figures - could be right. The same
figures could well apply to many hosting companies though, and they don't have
the insurance. Just an example.

I don't believe it's a rip-off anymore. Yes, you can still pay $1000 for a
cert. You can also pay $100. Is $100 too much? For something you couldn't make
for yourself without several million dollars or 'just' a few hundred thousand
and 5+ year wait before being able to use it?

~~~
moe
_The same figures could well apply to many hosting companies though, and they
don't have the insurance. Just an example._

Hosting companies have actual, real expenses, such as hardware dedicated to
each customer.

 _I don't believe it's a rip-off anymore. Yes, you can still pay $1000 for a
cert. You can also pay $100. Is $100 too much? For something you couldn't make
for yourself without several million dollars or 'just' a few hundred thousand
and 5+ year wait before being able to use it?_

I don't know what kind of kool-aid you've been drinking but these are the
structures that I'm criticizing. That's why I'm calling for legislation.
Verisign and friends should be put out of business _today_ rather than
tomorrow. They have proven maliciously incompetent for long enough, really.

They should be replaced with one government-operated CA per country. The
government has better tools to validate identity than any privately held
company anyways.

Moreover this would finally enable Joe Sixpack to make meaningful guesses
about which websites to trust. Countries would quickly grow a reputation for
certifying scammers or not. Browsers could offer customizable CA ratings
where, for example, a site certified by Nigeria triggers a popup warning.

The CAs could further establish multi-country validation for more trust. I.e.
"this cert has been signed by USA _and_ France".

None of this is possible with the current oligopoly of "Verisign", "Thawte"
and friends. Despite their insane revenue they're not even _trying_ to improve
the situation. They're not just slowing progress, they're actively pushing it
_backwards_ with brainfarts like those colored address-bars.

All for the sole purpose of making the money-printer run even faster.

~~~
ams6110
The government. Oh yeah great idea. So when you post something critical of the
wrong official or say the wrong words on your website your certificate is
summarily revoked.

~~~
moe
Depends. Some governments (hello China) may indeed do such a thing but if you
have such drastic steps taken against you then your SSL certificate is
probably the least of your worries.

I'm not saying that this solution would be perfect and yes, most governments
don't exactly have a flawless track record of managing, well, anything.

But no matter how screwed an actual implementation would end up - it can't get
much worse than what we have now.

Admittedly a government has relatively little motivation to make SSL good. But
even that is still better than what we have today with the commercial CAs -
those have a strong and frequently proven motivation to make SSL _worse_!

------
mdasen
There is, you just need to know where to look. GoDaddy has them for $30/year
and Namecheap has them for $15/year. I know that the Namecheap RapidSSL cert
is single root and at that price, you can't go wrong.

One of the things to note about SSL certificates: don't think you can renew
them like you can a domain name. When you renew, you get a new cert that you
have to install on your server. So buying multiple years at a time can save
you a lot of hassle (and drive the cost per year down).

Many certificate companies have bilked their customers into paying too much,
but there is competition. It's just that people change slowly. Plus, if
you're, say, Citibank, what are the odds that you're going to quibble over
$1,000/year? For many businesses, it just isn't worth the hassle of switching.
Even a company that I used to work for used to pay nearly my salary to an
outside firm for content management (and they didn't even have a good CMS).
So, many companies will just keep paying and it's one of those situations
where the markup is more valuable than pushing additional units.

~~~
tc
He was looking at wildcard certificate prices. GoDaddy is still $199/year for
those, and Namecheap resells RapidSSL wildcard certificates for $148.88. Sure,
both of those are way lower than my monthly bandwidth costs, but it isn't
exactly commodity pricing.

~~~
moe
I think you're missing the point. Wildcards obviously must be more expensive
than single-certs because they have those extra 2 bytes in the common name.
These bytes don't pay themselves, you know?

------
mgj
My understanding is the prices are high because there's an oligopoly. To have
competition, all the major browsers would have to agree to let in more
companies, and they're just not doing that.

~~~
nickf
Sorry, but that's incorrect. The major browsers will let you in - you just
have to pass all their audits, comply to all their regulations, and commonly
have a WebTrust audit....which can set you back mid-$xx,xxx. All browsers/OSs
are accepting new roots all the time - check the Mozilla dev lists/Bugzilla
and you'll see.

~~~
briansmith
You also have to wait about 5 years before you will have the 99%-99.9% browser
support that customers require.

------
ndaiger
I just bought a RapidSSL wildcard cert through this reseller:

<https://www.servertastic.com/rapidssl/>

It's a wildcard for $140-ish, which is the cheapest I could find. The wildcard
means it works for blah.domain.com, otherblah.domain.com, etc, etc.

Basically there are those "extended verification" certs that give you the
green crap in the address bar. Which I don't think users actually care about.

And yeah, the whole SSL business is an insane racket.

~~~
nickf
I don't know about racket, but you can read my other comments for, I hope,
some more insight.

As for the green-bar - I'll admit it's taking some time to get hold, but
testing (not just from my CA, but all of them) has shown consumer awareness is
increasing and people are inclined to 'trust' the green a bit more.

Mind you, the same users will stick their bank login details on a phishing
page with no ssl hosted on some .cn....so what can you do, eh? :)

~~~
moe
Sorry, despite my many posts in this thread already I can't resist to vent
about the green-bar stunt, too.

So, one day the CAs discovered that their regular certification procedure is
broken. That the "normal" certs are effectively unfit for their stated
purpose.

Am I the only one who would have expected them to go back, properly re-
validate their certs and fix the problem _that_ way? Or at least perform this
procedure at expiry time?

I mean, I understand that inventing new levels of "secure" (with fancy colors
even) is a much more effective way to sell more certs and crank up the prices.
But heck, can you think of a comparable stunt in any other industry?

Just imagine a watch-maker who has a problem with water-proofing to invent an
"even more water-proof" label instead of fixing their mishap. It would rain
tears and lawyers...

~~~
nickf
You're right - that should have happened. It didn't of course, because the
company(-ies) that started the DV issuance didn't want to go back and fix it.
As well as that, if the browser/OS people did 'downgrade' the DV certs,
millions of customers by that point would be affected. Assuming they cared
about the customers and not the heavy pressure to do nothing from....larger
CAs.... ;)

------
there
some ca's do more labor-intensive verification before issuing certs which may
cost them some money, but nowhere near what most are charging these days.
since nobody realistically checks who issued a certificate before trusting a
website with one, paying more for stricter verification nets you nothing.

while i probably wouldn't use them for a public-facing certificate on a
shopping site that needs 100% browser coverage, startcom issues certificates
for free that are supported by default in at least safari and firefox. very
useful for encrypting communications to your backend admin interfaces and such
where you just need to protect yourself rather than your customers.
<http://www.startssl.com/>

~~~
moe
_since nobody realistically checks who issued a certificate before trusting a
website with one, paying more for stricter verification nets you nothing._

The sad part is that the VeriSign's of this world put a lot of money into into
brainwashing the masses for the next addressbar-color. We have green bars,
yellow bars, blue bars... Expect the pink-unicorn-bar any day now (IE9?).

So yes, currently the users are conditioned to look for the padlock only and
you can get away with it in most cases. But I wouldn't be surprised if the
browser-makers soon get strongarmed into displaying those "unworthy" certs in
a less appealing way - crackled padlock, perhaps?

The net result will be more fancy address bar colors and even less
understanding for the average user whether the site he's looking at is
"secure" by any means or not.

This whole tragedy is one of the rare cases where I'd be glad to see
legislation to step in. Free market is just not working here, on so many
levels.

------
nickf
Also: I'll do a shameless plug here. If anyone here on HN needs a cert, or
just advise on setting one up, what to buy - I'm more than happy to help (even
if you don't get one of ours!). I'll certainly do what I can discounts-wise.

I'm a techie, not a marketeer-o-naut.

Email on my user profile.

------
briansmith
First, never buy a GeoTrust certificate directly from GeoTrust. They charge
their MSRP, but all their resellers charge less than the MSRP. For example,
you can buy that same exact certificate through Trustico for half the price
(scroll down):
[http://www.trustico.com/products/truebusinessid/true_busines...](http://www.trustico.com/products/truebusinessid/true_businessid.html)

Second, if you want a wildcard cert that works with mobile browsers, Verisign
and Geotrust are your only options for the next few years. After that, prices
should drop considerably as newer devices ship with many more root certs than
older ones.

~~~
briansmith
It looks like they are even cheaper at this reseller:
<https://www.servertastic.com/>

~~~
sho
Oops, I think I gave the multi year price and the GP quoted the single year
price. The prices are actually identical at $499 for 1 year. Sorry.

Of course, if you can pay, I would recommend buying as long as you can anyway.
Refreshing SSL certs every year gets real old, real quick.

------
sho
Use Servertastic - <https://www.servertastic.com/>. They're basically the
cheapest and best.

If it's a personal site or you're on a really strict budget, get RapidSSL.
It's a single cert, non chained, cheap enough. A wildcard is $149 a year which
will serve most needs well. However, there's one important caveat - mobile
phone browsers _suck_ and you will have difficulties with them using a
RapidSSL cert. Long and miserable experience there, trust me.

If you care about mobile browsers, or your few remaining strands of hair, you
need GeoTrust, which bumps the price up. "TrueBusinessID" is the one you need,
$114 for a single or $499/yr for the wildcard.

For both of these, the prices are lower for multiple years, of which you
should probably buy as many as you can afford. Refreshing SSL certs is a nasty
fiddly process and unless you are on a _really_ low budget it is probably best
to eat the upfront cost and buy 5 years out.

In answer to your question, why isn't there any other options - well, because
they were there first and their cert is everywhere and that's the price they
want. Simple as that. Sucks but here we are. At least $499 is less than $995.

(I am not affiliated with Servertastic in any way, shape or form other than as
a satisfied customer)

(edited to correct prices, i'd put the multi year discounts instead of single
year prices. sorry!)

~~~
briansmith
Thanks, you just saved me $50.

~~~
sho
As I commented below I accidentally gave the multi year price. Probably didn't
save anything. Sorry!

~~~
briansmith
Trustico wants $149.00 for a 1-year True BusinessID cert. Servertastic is only
asking $114.00. So, you still saved me at least $35.

------
yan
I don't understand why people still try to correlate value to difficulty of
producing something. That was never the case, especially in a service economy,
or else we wouldn't have people on the entire gamut of wealth.

Pro sports players don't get paid per effort dedicated, but by the amount of
_value_ they generate. You can complain about baseball players making millions
all you want, but in the end, they sustain a huge economy surrounding sports.

If SSL certificates were pennies (which is in essence what it takes to
generate them), then they would lose almost all value they provide. They need
to be somewhat expensive to not dilute the amount of valid certs. But that is
superficial; authorities take on responsibility of verification and they
assign their own name behind the validity of a third party. That's valuable.

~~~
tc
The amount of value you provide, less transaction costs, represents the
_maximum_ that you can charge for a product or service even if you are a
monopoly (and there are no viable substitutes).

In a market economy, competition drives prices down towards the product's
marginal cost to produce. Consumers then get to keep the 'excess' value
delivered. The lower price also brings in consumers for whom the product
delivers less value.

So when you have a product, like SSL certificates, where the marginal cost of
production is nearly zero, it is fair to ask why the certificates aren't
nearly free.

(And since the certificates are not free, and so the providers seem to be
printing money, we have to ask how all of us missed out on this business.)

~~~
nickf
Although the production costs are free, the maintenance costs (both short and
long term) to make the certificates have any worth to purchasers is very
significant.

~~~
moe
What are those maintenance costs that you speak of?

~~~
nickf
Ignoring wages, hosting, DR site maintenance, general business costs etc, the
other maintenance costs I can see over other SaaS/webhosting/domain businesses
(which are similar).

mid $xxxxx/mo for CDN hosting mid $xxxxx startup for the hardware (you can't
store keys on disk) mid $xxxxx anually for audit (thats the simple cost to get
it done, nothing to do with performing it - manpower, expenses, recification
of any issues) [Sometimes multiplied for various other compliancies/audits
around the world]

It's like this: Webhosting - you can pay $100 a year for mid-to-low-end
hosting. You could probably do it yourself from your ADSL line, or a cheap co-
lo, right? Save a few bucks.

SSL - you can pay $100 a year. Or, unlike hosting/SaaS, even becoming your own
domain-reg...you're looking at the above costs, plus waiting with your thumbs
up your ass for 5+ years before you can do anything. Still paying, too. You
could bypass the wait, shell out for the hardware and then pay 6-7 figures to
get a subCA and issue immediately. Rip-off? Not as clearly as you think.

------
mcav
I've seen a lot of certificate issuers for $15/year, so I have a different
question: Why the price difference? Are the cheap ones just as useful as the
expensive certs?

~~~
nickf
Here we go:

There's essentially 3 types of certificate:

DV - Domain Validation. The cheap, automated ones. Certs contain no more than
the domain name they're issued to, and the whole process is automated.

OV - Organisational Validation. The original 'standard' of certs, that most
CAs issued until a few years back. Domain ownership checked, business checked
(for legal existence and verified address).

EV - Extended Validation. The new 'green bar' standard. Lots of hoops to jump
through - agreements, legally-notarised letters, checking of business
existence with local govt. & third parties, phone number verification,
verification that the person requesting the cert actually has the right to do
so....and so on.

The question then becomes: why?

The OV and DV sadly appear the same to the user. A few years back, one CA
decided to issue the certs purely based on domain checking. Automation = cheap
certs = big, fast marker share. It took, they made money. Then a time came to
do something about the DV certs (ie making the browser chrome showing them
'less' secure or similar). By this time, the big boys in the CA world had
aquired the company and had a pretty penny invested in the DV certs not
becoming the red-headed stepchild.

So the CAs and the browser and the OS people invented EV. There's still talk
that DV will be 'downgraded' one day, but we'll see.

Other types: Wildcards as someone mentioned will cover unlimited subdomains of
the domain they're issued to (traditionally certs are for single FQDNs). Then
we've got the new UCC for MS Exchange/OCS which has multiple, unique FQDNs in
a single cert. Then you've got client & email certs, code-signing, and more :)

~~~
briansmith
"The OV and DV sadly appear the same to the user."

AFAICT, OV and DV certs appear differently in the newest versions of every
browser. Usually OV certs are blue and DV certs are white where EV certs are
green.

------
rksprst
I am guessing, but there might be high legal liability for SSL issuers so they
offset the costs to the customer.

~~~
tc
Can anyone point to a case where a SSL issuer has been sued successfully?

~~~
nickf
There isn't one. I very much doubt there ever will be.

------
vaksel
Godaddy has one for $30

~~~
mileszs
The URL to which the original poster points is to a wildcard certificate.
GoDaddy's cheapest wildcard offering is $199.99/yr.
<https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl.asp>

~~~
icey
That's still 1/5th the cost of the prices he's getting.

And to be fair, his specific question referred to "SSL Certificates", not
"Wildcard SSL Certificates".

------
chiffonade
Because a company the size of Verisign isn't just one guy at a shell prompt
generating keys for customers.

Trust is expensive. It's probably the most expensive thing you can buy in
modern society. A thousand bucks is a deal, if you ask me.

~~~
blasdel
Except that Verisign has shown itself repeatedly to be the least trustworthy
of all its competitors, for most of its major businesses.

