They donate 50% of costs to LE at the end of the year[1]. They’re charging for the operational overhead of LE provisioning/serving, not for the certificates themselves.
As someone who has bought one of these LE certs for money, I wasn't (just) paying for the cert, I was paying for convenience. I know I can get it for free and set it up myself. I don't want to set it up myself.
Nice idea, but.. I work with Single Sign-On setups for multiple companies, where both sides of the fence have a certificate which needs to be valid according to well known CAs, and they have to be manually renewed. So a 3 month validity is a non-starter - the cost of buying a 1 or 2 year cert is far less than the cost of manually updating every 3 months.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] threadone example: fly.io
[1] https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#managed-ssl-certificates
There are other providers out there. It would be good to collect them, perhaps into something like "awesome-acme" GitHub repo.