Does it Cost Money to Issue Digital Certificates on the Bitcoin Blockchain?
(I'm a Blockcerts developer)

Andrew is right -- that is simply the transaction fee. That fee is the same no matter the number of certificates in the batch for Blockcerts issuing.

I note that the documentation you're referring to is out of date, so I updated it just now to add more current fee information and to clarify how to determine the transaction fee.

Updates:


Ensure you've transferred sufficient funds to your issuing address to cover the transaction fee. 


The transaction fee is the same no matter the number of certificates in the batch.
The default transaction fee used by cert-issuer is 60,000 satoshis (~$1.50 USD, 7/3/2017). 
Because the transaction fee is a factor in confirmation time, you may decide to increase or decrease this value in the config file (read more about current transaction fee/latency estimates: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/).