They aren’t charging for the certificate so much as they’re charging for TLS termination, infrastructure, DNS, caching, handling invalidations, etc. It’s also 10 free then $0.10/mo per certificate thereafter (or $2/mo for wildcard). They also donate 50% of their TLS fees to Let’s Encrypt.

So, yes, some users will have have to pay for certificates, but it seems extremely reasonable to me.

well, maybe

but, my expectation as a PaaS customer in 2022 is that you shouldn't need to pay for a SSL cert

the expectation is because nobody else charges for them anymore, not even their competitors

Do they? I feel like you're just uncomfortable with line-item pricing and prefer flat all-in-one pricing. What are the other competitors that offer actual PaaS instead of static-site hosting?

* Render.com charges $0.60 per custom domain after the first 25

* Heroku gives you "free" custom certificates once you're on a $7/mo minimum.

A clarification: every static site or full stack app can have up to 25 custom domains for free on Render. Most sites only have 2 (apex and www).

Yeah but "after the first 25" may cover the majority of their customers. I myself am one of them, and at this point I don't care at all what happens after I reach 25 domains.

Essentially it _is_ free.

I agree with you of course. I feel the same way about fly.io’s pricing. For nearly all use cases, certs are free. Which is why I found it so odd that GP was complaining about it.