You can sign 7 apps a week for your own device with the tethered non-dev Apple ID. The certificates expire a week after, so you need to resign those 7 apps every week or they will stop working.

All of the "alternative" stores and distribution methods work with this mechanism, there is no better way and it is completely at Apple's whims.

Really, most interested users probably gave up at this point, looking at the decaying Jailbreak ecosystem.