Early stage startup that ships Windows software here: no, code signing certs are not that expensive. We paid $397 for a two-year code signing cert with DigiCer

Early stage startup that ships Windows software here: no, code signing certs are not that expensive. We paid $397 for a two-year code signing cert with DigiCert. Extended validation, which we would have happily paid for, costs about 2x but require physical access to our build server (which we don't have, using Azure / EC2.) The price we paid for our code signing cert is comparable with the SSL star cert that we use - probably actually cheaper on an annual basis.