Seems very clever, but I have to ask:

> DV certificates are $15.95/year per domain,

Not a bad price, very much one I'd be willing to pay in order to get certificates via a CLI.

> or $149.95/year for unlimited sub-domains.

Ouch, 10x for a wild card? Why do issuers do this? It really puts a crimp on the whole "hobbyist doing hobbyist things" since that's $150/year just to not have cert errors on a single domain.

(FWIW, I'm deliberately excluding StartSSL for a variety of reasons.)

The cynic in me presumes that it's to make up for the lost cash in charging you individually for all those subdomains.

What do you mean about cert errors on a single domain [requiring a wildcard]? Because you use a lot of subdomains, or the bare domain/www. prefix?

If it's the latter, I think some (many?) registrars may let you add one or more SubjectAltName[1] values to a single cert for free or minimal cost, at least compared to a wildcard.

[1] Other values for which the certificate is considered valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubjectAltName

I wonder why you're excluding StartSSL. It's no matter if you trust them as long as all major OS/browsers trust them.

Could be it also discourages script kiddies from pulling antics.

Not sure why you've been downvoted - this is pretty much the reason for elevated pricing of wildcard certs. They are more open to abuse (have seen them used for phishing sites), so the issuer carries a higher risk of having to do additional management around the cert (i.e. revocations), so therefore charge more.

    Wildcard SSL

        $149.95
        / year

This is incredible prohibitive to me considering it. :-(

maybe sslmate can make a deal with GlobalSign/AlphaSSL for wildcard DV certificates. At least there are resellers out there that offer wildcards for 42$ https://www.ssl2buy.com/alphassl-wildcard.php but of course suck at API/automation. I've seen other resellers (usually lowendtalk-VPS) selling AlphaSSL wildcards for below 40$/y in the past.

Yep, I use AlphaSSL right now. It's been doing me well for the past year, so I just renewed a couple days ago. No regrets at all.