Just like with OSS in general, being able to distribute it is what makes the effort worthwhile.

This particular example is maybe a niche, but 1400 people can use a few hundred queries in a reasonable amount of time.

This example is not that niche. Lots of people use human to bash. I'd probably use a small pre trained model if it was easy to use. I use a little script right now that calls a cheap model. Actually.. $5 would probably will last me over a year so the only real benefit would be if I didn't have an internet connection.