I to am in the bay area, and clearly I have been shopping at the wrong colos. I expected to find nothing with unlimited bandwidth for under $1k/mo given past experience with what may have been higher end DCs.

In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.

Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.