http://www.geotrust.com/ssl/wildcard-ssl-certificates/
This certificate costs $995 per year. If you think about it, there is very little that the issuer does, other than supposedly validate your ownership of the domain. They don't even need to maintain considerable server infrastructure.
So why isn't there no serious competition? Why isn't there a company that issues certificates for $10?
As someone mentioned - please don't equate the cost of the certificate to buy against the cost of the certificate to produce. Signing costs nothing (well, ignoring the expensive HSMs!).
Most of the cost is performing the vetting/validation. Then there's support costs. Then legal costs (insurance, warranties etc). There's often inherent costs with owning/controlling the root certificates - WebTrust annual audits just to get in the major browsers, plus any fees that some manufacturers charge for root-embedding. Infrastructure costs - CRLs and OCSP responders. CRLs may be tiny files, but we can serve TB a day in a 160KB file :)
Ask any questions - I'll answer as best I can.