Security is a part of it, but the fee also gets you 2 incident tickets with Apple engineers (way more that a forum chat - they'll look at code and debug) and a

Security is a part of it, but the fee also gets you 2 incident tickets with Apple engineers (way more that a forum chat - they'll look at code and debug) and a reasonably decent distribution infrastructure (their Mac App Store). I say none of that to justify the overall notion of a paid developer program, but it's wrong to characterise it as just security signing. Although, now that I think about it, I do pay yearly for certificates for my website - although not $99 :)