[brianjolney]

My understanding is free ones are not trusted/accepted by the browsers, hence to have something that isnt tossing errors at your users requires a small payment to a CA.

I've used positivessl from namecheap whenever I need certs, its something crazy cheap like $5

[dan85]

StartSSL works fine with all recent browsers. (I think IE 7+)

[elliottcarlson]

My understanding is free ones are not trusted/accepted by the browsers

You might mean self-signed certificates?

[charliesome]

Well anyone could start their own CA and hand out free certificates. The problem is that nobody trusts Joe Bloggs' new CA.