@litonfiredesign I believe from the 19th of this month webflow SSL will become free.
"Updates to Webflow hosting
We’re excited to announce three new hosting tiers that have several new features:
SSL Hosting will be available as an option for all hosted sites - for free! Many browsers will soon require SSL-enabled sites, and Webflow has you covered just in time! "
Well that would be a sigh of relief…
Not sure why the beta testers would be charged for helping out…?
yeah I agree… I saw that they wanted to charge beta testers $5/month… I didn’t bother and would have left if they charged me $5/month to get letsencrypt certificates…
Hi Kyle,
Thanks for voicing your opinion, I wanted to address a few of the points you raised. First of all, the letsencrypt service is the only scalable way we can provide SSL hosting at the price point you mentioned for our managed hosting service. It’s an amazing effort by LetsEncrypt to provide a certificate provisioning service for everyone, at no cost - a true step forward for everyone on the internet. However, I do want to point out that provisioning the certificate, and deploying/maintaining your certificate at scale are separate concerns. Of course, you can provision your own SSL certificate yourself for free and host your website on your own servers, but I think it would benefit the community if we detailed exactly what you are paying for with Webflow’s SSL product (which will be free after 12/19):
First, you still get the benefits of all of Webflow hosting, including our CDN when you use our SSL solution. For site content to be served quickly and to lower your TTFB (which Google is using as a signal for SEO rankings), we build and maintain a fleet of SSL terminators where you certificate is deployed. This drastically lowers the TTFB, and how long the SSL handshake process takes between the server and the client. To replicate this on your own, you would have to build, deploy, and maintain over 20+ SSL terminator servers on Tier 1 hosting (in our case AWS), and install your own letsencrypt certificate there to achieve the same performance characteristics as Webflow’s hosting.
Second, if you were to create your own LetsEcrypt certificate, that would mean you can only create a cert that lasts 90 days. This is a real pain, as for every domain you host, you will now how to update the certificate every 90 days. And if you forget, you, your clients, and your client’s clients will see a nasty SSL expiry error whenever you visit the site. With Webflow’s SSL solution, we will automatically renew your certificate, so your site’s visitors will never see any errors.
Third, we make sure we have the most up to date servers and security patches deployed on our SSL terminator fleet, so you do not have to worry about making the myriad number of configurations and optimizations to ensure your site’s traffic is secure as possible.
Fourth, as we provision more and more SSL certificates for sites, we need more computational and memory capacity on our servers so we can scale our hosting infrastructure stack. This is another reason why it was a paid feature in the beta period.
All of this required months of engineering effort to design, build and launch. We are still making a lot of improvements behind the scenes, like increasing the number of SSL servers to ensure your sites load as quickly as possible for users all over the world. If you participated in the SSL beta, thank you for your valuable feedback. We’ll be launching a lot of improvements to SSL hosting on 12/19, when we launch our new pricing plans.
As some of you have pointed out already, we will not be charging additionally for SSL on the 19th, and you will be getting it for free as part of our new hosting plans. 
If you have any other questions, please reach out! I’m happy to delve into the technical specifics of your SSL site if you are curious. Our goal here at Webflow is to make it as easy as possible for you to have the fastest, most scalable hosting on the internet - thank you for sharing our vision! 
Such a great explanation! Thanks so much for the detailed and thoughtful reply. 
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