Well…
The title says it all.
I remember when Google first started pushing SSL that people accused them of wanting to get into the SSL market.
…that was a while ago… Google isn’t in the SSL market but they sure are “forcing” us to adopt SSL.
I consider it a good push. And we’ve made some pretty decent money with folks wanting to setup SSL, lol. Like $1.5-2k a pop to migrate to https and modify theme/confirm all redirects/etc. Not part of our normal business but it’s so profitable we’ve just been stacking up the jobs and have 1 or 2 guys doing it part time.
1.5/2k a pop to setup SSL.
I suspect you’re not getting this business in LET 
Hah, hell nah. LET + solid profit margins = not happening.
One of our account managers has been spearheading the sales push on it, and she’s been collecting some nice commissions in the process. We’ve got 3 or 4 going at the moment, a bit of back & forth involved to make sure their hosts support SSL and whatnot - then reviewing the CMS/site files to make sure it’s a fairly straightforward switch. Even paying first world rates we’re at like 50-70% profit depending on difficulty.
It’s not like pushing a website to SSL is hard, for the average website/cms its easier than making pancakes.
Whoever I did have a hosting company tech blaming the registrar for his inability setup an SSL in the server… so I could have the website switched to https.
After a back and forth with him… I ended up just putting the website on a different server, emailed the guy again for him to see that the issue was not on the registrar side. His reply was something along the lines of “I can’t see any other reason for us not being able to issue the SSL”. And that was it…
Definitely not difficult, but we charge whatever people will pay. It started out as $1k, then $1250, then $1500 - and on complex jobs it’s about $2k.
They get to talk to a real person, get their phone # if things go wrong, we setup Let’s Encrypt/AutoSSL if they have it or just buy them a 2-3 year cert if their host doesn’t support it, setup SSL monitoring and send warnings if we see Let’s Encrypt/AutoSSL not renewing within 2 weeks of expiration, etc etc.
We’ve had to fix other SSL implementations where they were running duplicate copies of the site on http/https (no redirects, or in one case everything redirecting to the homepage) or pulling external insecure resources, etc.
It’s definitely not hard to do. With a WP site I can do it blindfolded in 30 mins to an hour. But we’ve found people willing to pay the premium to make sure everything’s setup correctly. Think the higher pricing has worked out in our favor because they’ll point at other guys doing it for $499 and we explain all the hand holding and guarantees - they wonder why the price discrepancy is there and then just end up going with us. 
Definitely not difficult, but we charge whatever people will pay. It started out as $1k, then $1250, then $1500 - and on complex jobs it’s about $2k.
I was not saying you shouldn’t. Sorry if I made it sound like you were scamming your clients, not what I meant to say at all.
Nah, didn’t take it that way. Was just agreeing that it’s super easy… but gotta charge what people will pay or you’re leaving money on the table for no reason 
but gotta charge what people will pay or you’re leaving money on the table for no reason
I get it. Honestly I am pretty bad at talking numbers with clients, more often than not I rape myself.
I was able to rob myself in a maintenance gig by ending up offering more to the client than what he initially asked and just because I hate to get into that conversation about how the initial budget won’t cut it because the requirements changed. So in the end, I end up paying to work. Isn’t that great? 
Don’t you think it’s getting harder and harder to explain clients why buying a template is THAT cheaper than working with you?
Edit: harder, because nowadays all clients are “experts” and “they know” we have a program that does in all in a few clicks.
We have very few clients that are ‘experts’ - those that are will negotiate on price a bit for some stuff, but as long as they understand scope we’ll quote them fairly. If they try to drive the price down we just have to walk away. Always sucks but not every client is right.
We do a fair amount of templated work, just switch the offering to more of a ‘professional setup’ type task. Also have a lot of other things to up sell (content, graphic design, advertising/marketing, etc). “Ok great, you can setup a decent looking site in 10 clicks - now what are you going to put on it? Are you going to spend 40 hours writing, editing and organizing content or do you just want to hand that to us for $XXXX”
“Now for the future, who’s going to keep the CMS patched and make sure you don’t get hacked, add new pages and photos when you need them?”
And then you bill them $200/mo to keep the site up to date and give them 2 hours of content changes, copy editing, or writing regular blog posts and stuff if they’re willing to pay a bit more. Have a few clients that we have record a post/changes in voice, and then our guys will transcribe and clean it up.
Just flip it on them. “Sure you’ll save money here, but what about this, that and the other thing?”
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Can confirm, paid a company 5 digits to get SSL on a .gov domain - well worth it to pass the liability onto a 3rd party.
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For anything that important it’s like 10% of budget goes towards implementation, 90% is QA.
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