I've seen anywhere between $5 - $50 for a <50mb application.

What sort of testing will you get for $50 paying 14 people? Seems rather pointless because no one will take that task seriously

It's just going to be one person, with 20 cheap devices or maybe even emulators. Even now, I get 20 'testers' but it's just to pass the requirement, pretty much none of them offer useable feedback. It's also a simple little word game, there isn't much to test...

Beware of spammers providing these services, it's an easy way to lose it all.

Definitely not worth the risk. I think all this policy is going to do is reinforce the already strong incentive to launch first on iOS and only consider an Android port once you've validated your idea. And the Android ports are going to be outsourced and often not very high quality.