Governments are sometimes just like people -- they get addicted to revenue streams and have a hard time adapting when those revenues change or go away.
It’s entirely self service.
With fairly high fixed costs and, likely, demand varying a lot as a function of price, picking a break-even price point isn’t really possible up-front.
For example, if they were to charge $1,000,000.— per page, chances are they won’t recover costs, but that doesn’t imply they should ask more.
I think governments should just give up on the idea of recovering costs on this kind of service. That may mean some people will benefit more from it than others, but then, be that so. Alternatively, put a reasonably high cap on the ability to query the system.