That's the price of promotional service. In real life, you can't even expect partial refund, let alone ROI, when you pay an advertising firm. With falling Steem prices, it is even harder to expect a return.

To be frank, I think @honesteem's service is mostly useless because they cannot detect "paid advertisements" from off the chain, and I've been to enough Discord servers to know that they happen.

And the notion that human curation represents community appreciation is ludicrous. I guess they have never seen huge circlejerks before. But hey, that's none of my business.