The phrase "a certain cost" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to an unspecified or particular cost associated with something.
Example: "Investing in renewable energy may involve a certain cost, but the long-term benefits outweigh the initial expenses."
Alternatives: "a specific cost" or "an associated cost".
She received great publicity from the trial, but at a certain cost.
If you want your mother placed in a particular geographic area and within a certain cost, you may be pushed to find one provider.
For the first time, a sport has helped pay its own way into the Games and not without a certain cost to the athletes.
So advertisers began paying for their banners accordingly, usually on the basis of a certain cost per thousand impressions, or C.P.M.'s.
Their identity can be created only through separation, difference and at a certain cost to those on either side of the dividing line.
The Cosmen family said it had agreed to back a rights issue as long as it did not rise above a certain cost.
Adding external data makes the prediction better for decision trees, but only up to a certain cost-per-instance of external data (between $5 and $10 in this case).
Our contribution is threefold: First, for a large class of optimization problems that satisfy a certain cost-stability property, we prove that no budget balanced Moulin mechanism can approximate efficiency better than Ω logn), where n denotes the number of players in the universe.
It took me some time and cost a certain price to find this out.
There is a certain financial cost associated with the QC, including the cost of the control materials and their measurements and the cost of the repetitions because of the rejections.
Those Stateside slogs have clearly toughened and tightened up the original trio from Leamington Spa, albeit at a certain abrasive cost.
