Will lets encrypt ever offer other ssls

Hi. So me and my hosting comapny Hostup was looking at other websites and saw that they had this greenbar, EV-SSL. I was wondering if Let’s encrypt ever will issue these ssls, I know that it requires some paper work, but still. All other providers charge you like 300 USD per year, so why not just take out a small fee here and put it towards growing this awesome community. I am sure that many more would move over here.

Hi @CryptToCoin,

This is a pretty frequently discussed topic on this forum. You can see some of the other discussions of it going back to 2015:

https://community.letsencrypt.org/search?q=extended%20validation

I think one of the most detailed threads on this topic is

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/plans-for-extended-validation

in which I explained several reasons why Let’s Encrypt is unlikely to do this.

The closest EV offering to Let’s Encrypt’s model, in terms of automating the things that can be automated, is probably CertSimple

https://certsimple.com/

Currently they list EV certs at $236, which is a little cheaper than the price you mentioned. :slight_smile:

The reason for the price difference between $0 and $236 is that EV cert issuance involves human labor, while Let’s Encrypt’s DV cert issuance doesn’t. That’s unlikely to change, and I’m not sure that we would do a better job than CertSimple does. And I don’t think that can be a priority for us, since we might potentially issue a few hundred or a few thousand EV certificates (mainly to sites that already use HTTPS!) as against tens of millions of DV certificates (mainly to sites that have never had any certificate before)

Meanwhile, Let’s Encrypt has lots of technical features to work on related to the existing DV product:

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I think this is exactly the reason why LE will never issue EV (or even OV) certificates: it isn't even close to the goal(s) of Let's Encrypt.

Also, if you really want an EV cert, you should look out for cheap offers and resellers. There are a lot way cheaper things out there than the “official” prices by the CAs. I recently bought PositiveSSL EV certs for 74.99 US$/year (if you pay for four years in advance). It’s not that hard to find out where you can get them for this price. It could also be that you can find even cheaper offers for EV certs.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way related to Comodo or SSL cert resellers in general. I’m just amazed every time I have to look what the range of prices actually is…

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If that's the aspect that attracts you - browsers have started moving away from it.

Desktop and mobile Safari have already completely removed the green bar - there's no visual distinction between DV and EV.

Chrome Canary has an experiment to get rid of it, not sure if it's going ahead or not.

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Related:

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