There are levels of pay for functionality, like subdomains, and being able to issue your own certificates.

For instance, from Verisign: a 1 year Microsoft code signing certificate starts at $499 [1]. A top-of-the-line (from their main pages) web certificate for a single server for one year: $1499 [2]

[1]: https://securitycenter.verisign.com/celp/enroll/selectOption... [2]: https://ssl-certificate-center.verisign.com/process/retail/p...

edit: it would figure the links don't work. Just go to www.verisign.com and those are a couple clicks from the front page.