I was always on that end - in a distant-ago job I'd somehow fallen into a position of looking after a server box for our subdomain that was under someone's desk.

Every year I'd preempt it and email our procurement and IT teams asking for a renewal months in advance (knowing the red tape means I'd get it JIT).

And, every year it wouldn't be renewed or bought until the day after expiry when I had enough complaints from people to light a fire under someone's arse.

The whole cert-package back and forth was a nightmare, am glad LE exists with auto renewals (or even manually pushing a renewal with one line is easier than the old).

There's always going to be stuff which is automatically renewed while you don't want to, or stuff you need to manually renew when you have to.

I have a wonderful suggestion for anyone who wants to combat this problem: put the end date in your agenda! If you're a busy person put multiple notifications about it, or learn to look in advance in your agenda.

Define expensive? https://www.cheapsslshop.com/ sells wildcards for $56 with easily to find discount code CMDWCXM25.

If you need wildcard most likely your have some sort of production platform and probably make some profits, at least $5 a month for a cert.

Full disclaimer: have nothing to do with cheapsslshop but been their happy client for few years now.

Totally agree. If CAs were smart they'd be implementing the ACME protocol, and attaching it to their (paid) backend systems. There's value to be added like longer expiry times and long-term assurances, a centralized management portal, wildcard and EV certificates, and higher (or no) re-issue limits that would go a long way to getting businesses using it.