Just like with OSS in general, being able to distribute it is what makes the effort worthwhile.
This particular example is maybe a niche, but 1400 people can use a few hundred queries in a reasonable amount of time.
This example is not that niche. Lots of people use human to bash.
I'd probably use a small pre trained model if it was easy to use. I use a little script right now that calls a cheap model.
Actually.. $5 would probably will last me over a year so the only real benefit would be if I didn't have an internet connection.
If it's about the latency / flow disruption, spending a few hours once could easily be worth it if the result is actually good enough to skip googling/retries.