Right, so you gets to pay the dev fees to have your code signed. That's why I specifically stated not-for-profit could use "free" code signing. If you're making money off of the software, pay the fees required as part of the business.

This “fee” is just a vendor abusing their position of power,

If you pay me to write code, and you want to run it on your PC, there’s no reason we should be having to pay a third party to allow this.