It's not 'artificial', for multiple reasons. You correctly address one by listing the cost, but the other is that they limit you to only being able to configure a certificate to a resource they manage, so that they can rotate that certificate transparently for you.
Yes, they could branch beyond that, and create a special category of certificates to issue, that has a cost, and that gives you access to the private key, but that isn't really distinguishable from any other certificate provider out there. In fact, Let's Encrypt offers that for free? Why would Amazon decide to compete with a paid product against a free one, when there's no benefit to the consumer to warrant paying?
>Why would Amazon decide to compete with a paid product against a free one, when there's no benefit to the consumer to warrant paying?
They compete with free Cloudflare caching today. And free DNS services. And much cheaper VPS services. There are various reasons customers might choose low cost over free.
For me, since I use ACM already, for AWS hosted resources, I would appreciate the advantage of using it for other resources. Even ones on AWS, like a cert on a Lightsail instance, for example.
I say artificial because all that's missing really is a link to download the cert.
Yes, they could branch beyond that, and create a special category of certificates to issue, that has a cost, and that gives you access to the private key, but that isn't really distinguishable from any other certificate provider out there. In fact, Let's Encrypt offers that for free? Why would Amazon decide to compete with a paid product against a free one, when there's no benefit to the consumer to warrant paying?