It's not single-vendor. The ACME protocol is also supported by the likes of GlobalSign, Sectigo, and Digicert.

You've got to remember that the reduction to a 45-day duration is industry-wide - driven by the browsers. Any CA not offering automated renewal (which in practice means ACME) is going to lose a lot of customers over the next few years.

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ZeroConcerns an hour ago | parent [-]

Effectively single-vendor. I'm not aware of any ACME-compatible CAs that don't have pernicious limits on their free plans (and if there are, I'd love to hear!), and here in the EU we've even recently lost a rather big player...

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dmurray 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

"multiple vendors, but only one of them is nice enough to give the product away for free" is not "effectively single-vendor".

The other CAs aren't prohibitively priced for anyone who has a business need for lots of certificates, in case Let's Encrypt disappears or goes rogue.

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ZeroConcerns 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

> other CAs aren't prohibitively priced

Not if you look at the per-cert pricing, but if you factor in the cost of "dealing with incompetent sales" and "convincing accounting to keep the contract going", they absolutely are.

	▲	toast0 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When I was working with Digicert a decade ago, it was expensive, but they also had knowledgable support and with a wildcard cert, they would issue all sorts of 'custom duplicates' by request that were super handy. No incompetent sales, but certainly you do need to make sure accounting will pay.

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arp242 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't ZeroSSL do this? acme.sh has been using it as the default for the last few years. As I understand it, it basically offers the same as Let's Encrypt.

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ZeroConcerns 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

https://zerossl.com/pricing/ suggests a 3-cert limit on the free tier, as well as a huge influx of expected spam...

	▲	arp242 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think that refers to something else (manual non-acme certificates)? Many other pages says it's unlimited. E.g. https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme