Hiring the original author is surely more expensive than using Claude to just maintain the current feature set. That is one of the possible approaches we came up with for continuity on our own clusters. It's not a great solution and is far outside our business, but it's better than nothing.

In an ideal world I'd love to just hire/sponsor the author, but we're a small non-profit that can't even afford to hire devs we need for our core product, so hiring the author just to maintain our backup solution is out of the question.