Head of Let&#x27;s Encrypt here.<p>You nailed it. It&#x27;s important that our certs be free because we can&#x27;t automate a billing interaction. If we had to charge then sysadmins couldn&#x27;t just type a command and be on their way. Automated renewal could fail because billing info was out of date. This stuff has to just work, reliably, if we&#x27;re going to expect the entire Web to use TLS.