Yesterday, November 18th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced a project that will make SSL and encryption on the web completely free. They have created a non-profit organization called the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) in collaboration with Mozilla, the University of Michigan, Cisco, Akamai and Identrust.
The ISRG are launching a project called Lets Encrypt which will be making free SSL certificates available for any website starting Summer 2015. But they go further than that. It has always been fairly technical to install an SSL certificate and so Lets Encrypt are creating applications for platforms like Linux and other web hosting operating systems that let you install and activate SSL for your web server with a few keystrokes.
So the net result is that, starting Summer 2015, not only will SSL for any website on the Net be completely free, but you will also be able to install and activate SSL on your site with just a few keystrokes and no payment.