I'm sure you didn't mean to, but this comes across as a shallow dismissal, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.", as well as the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).
A comment like this could turn from a bad one to a good one if it were written more in the key of curiosity: what are the similarities or differences? what are some pointers for further development? and so on. If you know more than someone else does, that's great, but then please share some of what you know so we can all learn.
Telling somebody that their project which they've been pouring their passion and creativity into is merely reinventing some well-known thing that's been around for years is going to come across as a putdown even when it isn't intended that way. The effect is to shut down creativity and exploration, which is the opposite of what this place is supposed to be for.
Reminds me of “Chargie”, a gadget that goes inline with your USB charging cable and controlled by an app on the device to limit the charge level to whatever you choose. I think it was born via kickstarter.
“The most Intelligent Battery Health Protection for Phones & Laptops”
https://chargie.org/
The lowest I found is two clip-on CAT5e cable termination jacks for $0.80 + 0.08 tax. Available in a rainbow of colors and shipped free to Seattle by Sunday if you order in the next 10 hours.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T63ST97
That was a smart move but those days are over. Your existing 15 year certs will continue to be accepted until they expire but then you'll have to get a new cert and be in the same 45-day-churn boat the rest of us are.
The cloudflare 15 year cert is one they issue privately and that they only use to authenticate your origin. Cloudflare manages the certificates for connections coming from the web.
The other CAs with a free tier that I'm aware of (zerossl, ssl.com, actalis, google trust, cloudflare) require you to have an account (which means you're at their mercy), and most of them limit the number of free certs you can get to a very small number and don't offer free wildcard certs at all.
Let's Encrypt could easily refuse to issue a certificate for a certain domain, even if you don't have a registered account. I don't see much difference.
AWS Certificate Manager manages this all for you via DNS validation.
Granted, you're locked into their ecosystem, can't export PK, etc. so it's FAR from a perfect solution here but I've actually been pretty impressed with the product from a "I need to run my personal website and don't want to have to care about certificates" perspective. Granted, you're paying for the cert, just not directly.
Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them.
Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go.
