SSL certificates in 2026: free with Let's Encrypt or paid EV, real costs
Let's Encrypt is free but DV only. EV certificates cost from £60 to over £970 per year: pricing from DigiCert and Sectigo and when it's worth spending.
UptimeMag editorial team · 14 October 2026 · 2 min read
An SSL/TLS certificate costs nothing if you only need to prove domain ownership: that's Let's Encrypt, free, renewed automatically every 90 days. It costs from roughly £60 to over £970 per year if you also need business identity verification (OV) or extended validation with legal checks (EV). The difference is not in the encryption, which is identical in all three cases, but in what gets verified before the certificate is issued.
DV, OV, EV: what actually differs
A DV (Domain Validation) certificate only checks that the requester has access to the domain, via DNS or a file on the server. This is the Let's Encrypt level, ZeroSSL, and most free or budget certificates. An OV (Organization Validation) certificate adds verification of the legal existence of the business: the CA checks the business registry, address, phone number. An EV (Extended Validation) certificate goes further: it requires corporate documents, verifies that the person signing the request has authority to do so, checks the actual operational status of the business. The padlock in the browser is identical in all three cases: the difference only appears when opening the certificate details.
One point that supplier websites usually don't mention: since 2019, Chrome, Firefox and other major browsers have removed the green bar with the company name that once distinguished an EV site at a glance. Today the information remains in the certificate, but the average user won't see it without specifically clicking on the padlock.
How much an EV costs: the price lists
Prices checked on 14 October 2026 from official supplier price lists, excluding VAT where indicated.
| Provider | Certificate | Annual price |
|---|---|---|
| DigiCert (authorised reseller Trust Italia) | Basic OV | £135 + VAT |
| DigiCert (authorised reseller Trust Italia) | Basic EV | £216 + VAT |
| DigiCert (authorised reseller Trust Italia) | Secure Site EV | £620 + VAT |
| Sectigo (official store) | PositiveSSL EV | $79.84/year |
| Sectigo (official store) | Sectigo EV SSL Certificate | $159.20/year |
| Sectigo (official store) | Sectigo EV Multi-Domain | $279.20/year |
| Sectigo (official store) | EnterpriseSSL Pro with EV Multi-Domain | $2,639.12/year |
To these must be added, in various cases, extra domains beyond the base quota: for DigiCert EV Flex the additional cost starts at £122 per year for each extra domain on annual subscription.
When it's worth spending
For a brochure website, a blog, a small shop, a personal project: Let's Encrypt (DV, free) is enough. It's activated with certbot --nginx or certbot --apache and renews itself. For a corporate website that wants to display the company name in the certificate details, without spending high figures: an OV, a few tens of pounds per year more than DV.
EV makes sense when the sector requires it for internal policy or contract with a partner (banks, insurance companies, healthcare, government), not for the visual effect in the browser, which today barely exists. Before buying an EV, it's worth asking whether the additional cost over an OV – often more than £70 per year, as the table shows – is justified by a genuine requirement or merely by habit.
Written with the help of artificial intelligence and checked by the editors (EU AI Act, art. 50).