There is, you just need to know where to look. GoDaddy has them for $30/year and Namecheap has them for $15/year. I know that the Namecheap RapidSSL cert is single root and at that price, you can't go wrong.
One of the things to note about SSL certificates: don't think you can renew them like you can a domain name. When you renew, you get a new cert that you have to install on your server. So buying multiple years at a time can save you a lot of hassle (and drive the cost per year down).
Many certificate companies have bilked their customers into paying too much, but there is competition. It's just that people change slowly. Plus, if you're, say, Citibank, what are the odds that you're going to quibble over $1,000/year? For many businesses, it just isn't worth the hassle of switching. Even a company that I used to work for used to pay nearly my salary to an outside firm for content management (and they didn't even have a good CMS). So, many companies will just keep paying and it's one of those situations where the markup is more valuable than pushing additional units.
He was looking at wildcard certificate prices. GoDaddy is still $199/year for those, and Namecheap resells RapidSSL wildcard certificates for $148.88. Sure, both of those are way lower than my monthly bandwidth costs, but it isn't exactly commodity pricing.
I think you're missing the point. Wildcards obviously must be more expensive than single-certs because they have those extra 2 bytes in the common name. These bytes don't pay themselves, you know?
One of the things to note about SSL certificates: don't think you can renew them like you can a domain name. When you renew, you get a new cert that you have to install on your server. So buying multiple years at a time can save you a lot of hassle (and drive the cost per year down).
Many certificate companies have bilked their customers into paying too much, but there is competition. It's just that people change slowly. Plus, if you're, say, Citibank, what are the odds that you're going to quibble over $1,000/year? For many businesses, it just isn't worth the hassle of switching. Even a company that I used to work for used to pay nearly my salary to an outside firm for content management (and they didn't even have a good CMS). So, many companies will just keep paying and it's one of those situations where the markup is more valuable than pushing additional units.