It depends. I’ve ran small websites and other services on a old laptop at home. It can be done. But you need to realize the risks that come with it. If the thing I’m running for fun goes down. someone might be slightly annoyed that the thing isn’t accessible all the time, but it doesn’t harm anyones business. And if someones livelihood is depending on the thing then the stakes are a lot higher and you need to take suitable precautions.
You could of course offload the whole hardware side to amazon/hetzner/microsoft/whoever and run your services on leased hardware which simplifies things a lot, but you still run into a problem where you need to meet more or less arbitary specs for an email server so that Microsoft or Google even accept what you’re sending, you need to have monitoring and staff available to keep things running all the time, plan for backups and other disaster recovery and so on. So it’s “a bit” more than just ‘apt install dovecot postfix apache2’ on a Debian box.
I have absolutely zero insight on how the foundation and their financing works, but in general it tends to be easier to green light a one time expense than a recurring monthly payment. So it might be just that, a years salary at first to get the gears running again and getting some time to fit the ‘infinite’ running cost into plans/forecasts/everything.