Brad, I’m a little confused with the “Secure Certificate”

Am I correct to say my site is just as secure now with the “Not Secure” label as it was prior to this label appearing?
If you purchase a “Secure Certificate” what is different other than removing the “Not Secure” label? If nothing then are we just paying an annual fee to get the “Not Secure” label removed.

We purchased our URL from CC and our site has no revenue generator. So we pay for the URL, a hosting site to hold our yearbook files in a Flip Page format, fees to convert yearbooks to digital flip page format, etc etc. Our site is a multi-year site and as administrator I contribute hundreds of hours to get each class year up and all the individual grad pictures scanned, sized and posted to each individual classmate.

I really don’t want to have to find the funding for an annual fee for a “Secure Certificate” $49/yr or $35/yr if purchasing more than 1 year. I’m in Canada and although the currency is not stated I expect that the secure certificate costs are US$ So even more for Canadians. $49 US equals $61.80 CDN and $35 equals $44.15 CDN without even counting exchange fees.

I hope you can clarify this for me and perhaps explain what in addition to removing the “Not Secure” label we get for this fee.

I also know hat most of our users are 65+ and not technically savey so this can be scary for them. As such we could be loosing classmates as they become more aware of this “Not Secure. Label..HELP Please

Ron,
I think your last sentence is an excellent add!

Ron, I believe you're correct in saying your site is just as secure now with the "Not Secure" label as it was prior to this label appearing.

Vital contact info, including a classmate's email address, street address, and phone numbers has always been secure, i.e. not accessible to the general public, without a certificate.

For me, the removal of the "Not Secure" label in front of the URL justified our getting the secure certificate.

I agree with Scott.

In addition, after purchasing Security Certificate, our website now has a padlock icon.

As posted on Forbes:
“A significant benefit of SSL certificates is the fact that they will help you gain visitors’ trust. Your website will be displayed with a security padlock in the address bar of the browser. This will indicate that the connection is secure and will show your website’s visitors that you take their privacy seriously. If your website doesn’t have a certificate, some browsers may label it as ‘unsafe.’ “

Why doesn't Class Creator provide a secure certificate for the expensive costs it has to maintain a site here. Is this just to give more profit margin to Brad?

Tyler, on Feb. 18, 2021, Brad addressed your concern in his response #6 to the topic New Secure Certificate in the General Discussion forum: https://forums.classcreator.com/messages.cfm?threadid=2B5257C0-E079-30ED-55B2016EAC6CAB73

He said, "For everything there is a cost. I can assure you the price offered for secure certificates is not Class Creator overcharging or running large profit centers. It's simply Class Creator charging a fee that allows us to make this feature available at all."

Either you believe Brad or you don't. I believe him. I also believe the cost of having a Class Creator site is very reasonable.

Ron: Yes, same as before. What changed is the additional browser warnings. It's the way the browser industry went. There is something to be said for having all site pages encrypted though. Yes, the warning can be scary to people. It's simply not ideal having that display, this is true.

Tyler: Industry costs for secure certificates range from low to high. GoDaddy charges well more than we do. Our cost factored in time to offer this at all (the system was never structured to accommodate something like this -- it's something we never saw coming over a decade ago when this was designed). We offered it because it was needed and the price allowed for it. It's that simple.