That one random CA you quoted costs $267 a year.
As far as I can see the requirement is that the CA is cross-signed by Microsoft, and that's quite a large list [0].
I'm only familiar with one of them (StartCom), and that one charges $59 a year for unlimited domain certificates and 1 code signing certificate.
[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...
Apple certificate costs 99$. Indeed, you won't be able to sign anything else, but it is still more that 2 times cheaper.