This pretty much sums up the entire thread.

No one is understanding that having a few extra hours a month to build features and find customers is worth a couple hundred bucks. It's probably worth thousands of dollars a month.

It also performed a lot better, if that helps. Granted for some orgs, even a $10k per month hosting bill might be no big deal. But we package Discourse for usage, and generally speaking less expensive means more people using it.

There is a point of diminishing returns, of course, pushing down to $5/month is a lot of pain -- super low cost super low resource hosting, etc.