What is being asked in this proposal is, in my opinion, very conservative.
Do you have an idea how much it costs to maintain a server?
The electricity alone is usually between 20 and 50 US dollars a month depending on in which state your server is located. Add licenses, parts that need to be replaced and so on and you quickly get to $ 100 a month.
Regarding dev maintenance that's a very low request as well. You periodically need to install security patches, sw updates, fix bugs, update your bot due to API deprecation (eg. new hard fork), test your fixes, perform monitoring and support, etc etc.
Also keep in mind that the average salary in the US is 80 K a year. In some cities like New York, Miami or California they're even higher. Quality isn't cheap. People that work on these projects most of the times are freelancers/contractors. I have been doing that for 5 years now and I can assure you that for instance in the UK they don't charge less than £ 300 a day and in the US no less than $ 1K a day. So what this proposal is asking is almost pocket money, in proportion.
I am pretty sure that the main purpose of this proposal is not speculation but just to get a little something back while supporting the community and the ideals behind its blockchain.
Also, from what this proposal is asking in terms of fundings you also need to consider taxes, hbd price fluctuations and risk of funding halt!
Yes, I have maintained many servers.
Hive bot don't need more than 16 GB RAM, you can get 64 GB RAM servers for less than $50 per month (Hetzner).
Outsource the work to Asia of Eastern Europe. It's not like linux server admins and (probably) JS devs are hard to find. All the work can be done remote.