I previously developed a consumer, Electron-based desktop application in the last year. One of the thing I was unaware of going in was the cost of code signing

I previously developed a consumer, Electron-based desktop application in the last year. One of the thing I was unaware of going in was the cost of code signing certificates. To support Windows and macOS it cost me around $200/year to avoid the OS showing a security warning when opening the application. The Windows code signing certificate I have is an OV certificate which means it builds up trust over time before the installation security warning goes away. It seemed to go away within a week of release, but was still frustrating to deal with. An EV certificate skips the trust building step and can be purchased for about 5x the cost. A couple months ago I switched to a Progressive Web Application (PWA) which reduced costs and removed the installation requirement. There are capabilities lacking in web applications, but there are planned features such as native file system API [1]. Hopefully these also make their way into Firefox and others. No desktop PWA support in Firefox at all yet. [1] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/capabilities https://developers.google.com/web/updates/capabilities