> But I'm not necessarily thinking of a standalone "free certificate company" but maybe more of a "bonus" to some other product or service.
This is what I expect we'll see more of, rather than a second (and perhaps slightly different) Let's Encrypt. Major cloud providers will probably add their own variants of what Amazon offers with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM); more CDNs will start offering one-click SSL (like Cloudflare); "traditional" web hosting providers and control panel vendors will (hopefully) support SSL by default (like cPanel with AutoSSL, which supports Comodo and Let's Encrypt).
Yeah, and I'm also hoping they will gravitate toward more "standard" interfaces like you touched on at the end there.
With the help of Let's Encrypt and through some cooperation, we could make easily "pluggable" SSL cert providers where you can choose who you want with the click of a button.
I think it's fairly likely we'll see a number of CAs adding ACME support at some point. Judging by participation on the ACME mailing list, there seems to be interest from (at the very least) DigiCert, Entrust and cough StartSSL. I guess most of them will want to wait for the standardization process to finish before announcing any plans.
This is what I expect we'll see more of, rather than a second (and perhaps slightly different) Let's Encrypt. Major cloud providers will probably add their own variants of what Amazon offers with AWS Certificate Manager (ACM); more CDNs will start offering one-click SSL (like Cloudflare); "traditional" web hosting providers and control panel vendors will (hopefully) support SSL by default (like cPanel with AutoSSL, which supports Comodo and Let's Encrypt).