If you read the first line as “make a handsome profit”, I get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean “this service [permanent backup] costs real money to operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow”, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren’t free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of family memories in digital form.

It is a way to make money. Provide service in exchange for money. I'm not sure what's wrong with that.

If he could figure out how to do it without ever spending money, that would be amazing and I would fully support it. As it stands, I saw what he was asking, did some math to sort out how he could manage it full time, and made a recommendation.

People are tired of SaaS, I get it, so I suppose you could ship an app to do something similar; wire it to talk to every possible imaging/recording device and then automate the 'download all pictures from this device'. But it still takes time. And potentially money.

I'm surprised it took a whole hour for someone to turn a charity into a SaaS