The run cost was first bootstrapped by @pharesim, an awesome top witness who also encouraged me on the development. :)
Now that the project is going though, I feel like we already have a way to fund these kind of projects -- the reward pool. It's what it's there for! I don't think the community should have to spend their own earned money on this, when steemit has a way to reward effort already. I've been nicely rewarded for my past posts (but is that to reward me on the development, or pay for costs? Do I "deserve" a reward for creating it too? Well, deserve is subjective.), but we can figure something out for the long term, similar to how I want to figure out how to reward human abuse hunters as I mention in my post.