My dear friend Luke,
Thanks for your monthly shout out! Really appreciated. I know you're using SteemSQL's, like many others.
It took me months to decide to charge for my services. Even after the failure of my call for support, I still was in between, because I knew it would kick out many SteemSQL users from playing with it.
To be honest, what decided me was the fact that, every day, I receive several dozen notifications for posts that mention SteemSQL. In general, these are posts with statistics, personal analyzes of the activity of the platform, etc ... Just for the previous month, this is 114 authors who pocketed 9247 SBD!
And that does not take into account the innumerable bots that non-stop assault the database with queries. I have setup some monitoring few days ago. I enumerated no less than 1505 different query issuers.
If they all shared a few percent of their income, I would not need to switch to a pay for use model.
I was utopian, hoping that these users would participate in the funding of the tool they daily use. I would be foolish to continue to ruin myself on the basis of beautiful principles.
As a developer (and at the current prices of SBD), $70 a month seems a bit high to me ...
Asking for SBD was the easiest way to do (rather than using FIAT). Moreover, the blockchain ensure transparent transaction and easy way to solve dispute if the transaction fail. I wanted to put a simple and efficient way to activate your subscription. The problem with SBD is its current volatility. Would I choose a price pegged to some amount in dollar, the fee would constantly change.
I set my price based on an expected hundred active subscriptions. This is what I need to sustain current costs and some new ones I will expose to scale up the infrastructure. And again, it only includes the infrastructure costs and not the time I spend to maintain it and provide support to users. Shall one thousand users subscribe to the service, for sure I would lower the fee.
... considering I may be able to obtain the data myself.
Some like you can do it, And you're free to go that way.
Some other can't. Then they rely on me to do it ... but I won't do it at lost anymore.
Finally, I invite you to read this post from 
Till now, I haven't be lucky enough to have people, users or not, to organize such a supportive campaign.
I'm not complaining ... just showing that on Steemit like in real life, there is disparity. I just want SteemSQL (and me) to survive.
Since you're listed on the developer resources page ...
This is something I discovered recently.
... maybe steemit, inc could help subsidize this?
I have never been good at knocking doors to get money. Do you wanna be my PR boy? ;)
RE: SteemSQL is moving to a monthly subscription model