Self-signed isn't a great option as I don't want to distribute my own signing cert to potential customers/people using or testing my app.
Am I missing a trick? What do you guys do?
Spending $60/year is a silly thing if one only wish to test his website. But what is he can get SSL with high security & privacy with lowest price ever!
Get Comodo PositiveSSL certificate from CheapSSLSecurity.com, here you can get it a only $4.80/Year with 90% heavy discount.
2048-bit Comodo PositveSSL Certificate comes up with up to 256-bit strong encryption length & compatible with 99.9% web & mobile browsers.
Click here to get Comodo PositiveSSL Certificate at only $4.80 - https://cheapsslsecurity.com/comodo/positivessl.html.
I did comparison at the time of purchase and I never found lower than cheapsslshop. They also sell other certs at huge discount.
But at http://www.cheapsslsecurity.com/ you can get it at $4.80 on 24x7x365 bases.
For projects (assuming you mean something you're releasing to the public), use a reputable SSL provider, however much it costs. The most expensive are a few hundred a year. Even if you have 10 projects running simultaneously (which is unlikely), that's only ~$3k, which is a pretty easy amount of money to make back.
A more realistic number of projects is around 3, and a cheap certificate could easily be less than $100. You can change the domains as you shut down and start up new projects, so your total every year doesn't have to be more than a few hundred.
I found certificate vendor who offers low-cost wildcard ssl certificate at $42 - https://www.ssl2buy.com/alphassl-wildcard.php
Other option, if you can wait for the future https://letsencrypt.org/