Question: I paid for an SSL certificate from Namecheap, I think it was certified by ComodoSSL. It cost me 7$, it took them a week to activate and I had to do it myself from SSH while editing my site's configuration files.

Then a friend made me aware of [Let's Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/) who not only give out free SSL certificates, but they can be installed by running a single command.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, but why would I want to pay for an SSL certificate when I can get one installed easily, for free, with automatic renewal set up?

Answer: 
Let's Encrypt is superior in many ways, including the ones that you have mentioned, such as:

1. It's free. Hard to get past that.
2. It has automatic renewal (I'm sure it's not JUST exclusive with Let's Encrypt, however)
3. It's pretty easy to set up.
4. Google and many others support it as a trusted CA, which is a huge deal when it comes to SEO and security.

**However, there are a couple of cons.**

1. The verification system that it works on to make sure that, you, well, own the site, is not compatible with some website hosts, I have had a fair amount of headache trying to get Let's Encrypt work on InfinityFree and I just accepted the fate that I couldn't do it.
2. You don't get any kind of insurance that says "If this breaks, we'll help you out" since it's open-source, you are on your own if Let's Encrypt doesn't work or is somehow cracked.
Not everything can use automated renewal
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CertBot makes it easy to use for websites... but what if you're using certificates for other things?

We have an LDAP server that our website authenticates with. It runs over a secure port, but it needs a signed certificate to run. I could go with a free wildcard certificate... but that means converting the certificate to PKCS12 every 3 months (web servers use PEM) and then importing the new certificate. Oh, and our network firewall uses PKCS12, too. That's a lot of hassle for free.