Having worked on a lot of projects with low/no budget, particularly at their beginning, I wonder if a good 'solidarity' support structure could be designed?
Im thinking free to get going, with some explanation of resources required to keep it going and requests for contributions.
Maybe some easy way for the hoster to have good visibility into resource usage and to trigger requests - that could optionally go out to the instance 'admin' and/or their users (give the admin some choices)
Also have some clearly defined streams for regular contributions where you may then avoid requests