Maybe half of the 3rd party apps I have on my applications folder right now are not notarized. It’s really not that big of a deal.

It’s a friction point for potential customers, so we do it with our Electron based app,

The USD 99 annual fee is almost inconsequential, the painful part was getting a DUNS number (we’re a South African entity) and then getting it to work in a completely automated manner on our build server.

Fortunately, once set up it’s been almost no work since.

It is a big deal. You can no longer just right click apps to run them, you have to take a trip to a subpanel of system settings, after clicking though two different dialogs that are designed to scare you into thinking something is wrong (one mentions malware by name).

For normal users this might as well be impossible.

Remember, your average user needs a shortcut to /Applications inside the .dmg image otherwise they won’t know where to drag the app to to install it.