> $469 USD per year?
No. All certificates are two years - the big price is the total. I've made this more apparent on the front page.
If someone wants a non-EV cert we also recommend https://letsencrypt.org
We could easily sell non-EV certs - they can be generated in seconds as they don't require manual ID verification to make a quick buck, but I think poor identity verification is what got SSL into the current mess we're in. You'll note GitHub, Stripe, Mozilla and npm have EV certs. Make of that what you will.
Unfortunately letsencrypt doesn't do EV certs.
We compared Symantec (whose brands include GeoTrust) when deciding on a CA partner. We picked Digicert based on the issuance speed and business practices. Symantec upsell IE5-level export encryption as a security feature. We don't want to support that.
The CA we chose to partner with - Digicert - who we have the same prices as - sits in the middle of the market. They makes the certs for GitHub, Facebook, Intel, Yahoo, and Nintendo.