Sorry. My point was it was a lot of money precisely because it cannot legally exist. If it could collect donations via a commercial payment processor, it could raise that much money from end users easily. Or grants from institutions. But in this case it seems like it has to be self-funded.
Sure. Let's add redundancy and bump by an order of magnitude to give some headroom -- $5-10k is a totally reasonable amount to fundraise for this sort of application. If it were legal, I'm sure any number of universities would happily shoulder that cost. It's miniscule compared to what they're paying Elsevier each year.