I watched the video on the open source maintenance fee page (https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/) and it explains that the fee is for 1) people/orgs who make revenue from the open source code AND 2) want to interact with the GitHub project (e.g. open issues). You can however 1) make revenue from the open source code, but not interact with the GitHub project without paying the fee.

For instance, if I'm an organization that wants to use this open source project for free, I can download and build the code, but not download a GitHub generated release binary.