"because you are cheap" What a weird take.

Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and they laugh at you. You get a gold star if they find something with your "contribution". But they get a billion dollars for finding the next lucrative drug