Let's Encrypt, the free SSL certificate service backed by EFF, Mozilla, others, announces limited launch end of July and general availability mid-September
Let's Encrypt Launch Schedule — Let's Encrypt has reached a point where we're ready to announce our launch schedule.
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement sets the calendar for what becomes one of the most consequential web-infrastructure launches of the decade: an EFF-led certificate authority, built with Mozilla and Cisco, promising TLS certificates at zero cost and automated issuance. The schedule matters because HTTPS until now has carried a per-certificate price and manual renewal burden that kept much of the web on plain HTTP.
The arc that follows validates the bet: the project ships its first free HTTPS certificate in September, wins trust from all major browsers by October, enters public beta in December, and crosses a million certificates within three months — eventually issuing over 380 million certificates across 129 million domains and becoming the world's largest certificate issuer.
First-order effects
- Website operators get a concrete date to switch to HTTPS without paying a certificate authority or managing manual renewals, removing the two biggest cost barriers to encrypting small and mid-sized sites.
- EFF, Mozilla, and Cisco convert a standards-advocacy position — universal encryption — into running production infrastructure, putting their operational reliability on the line starting end of July.
Second-order effects
- Browser trust becomes the make-or-break gate: once Mozilla and other vendors root-trust the certificates in the fall, commercial certificate authorities face direct competition at a zero price point for the entry tier of the market.
- Free, automated issuance shifts the value in certificates away from the certificate itself toward validation automation and higher-assurance products, forcing incumbent issuers to reposition upmarket.
Third-order effects
- If issuance scales as it ultimately did — hundreds of millions of certificates across over a hundred million domains — encrypted-by-default becomes the norm for the independent web, and certificate authorities consolidate around either free-at-scale or premium-assurance positions rather than the old per-cert commodity business.
- The model establishes nonprofit-backed infrastructure as a viable pattern for securing core web protocols, a template other EFF- and Mozilla-affiliated projects can follow.
The trend: Web encryption is shifting from a paid, manually managed product into free automated infrastructure, with nonprofit-backed issuers displacing the traditional certificate market's low end.