Wow sounds like they're hosting the site only on one or two servers at that budget.
But this is nothing new...it's always been well known that private tracker sites earn a lot of money from donations and they don't all go towards just cost but also the founder's 'time'. I have not seen many staff of such torrent sites get paid and it's usually one person or a handful of people who share in the proceeds of the donations.
It depends how you feel about it. If you feel that these people should not be making a profit especially on content that is not theirs, then it's quite unrealistic to expect people to spend the time and effort to maintain the private tracker site for 'break-even'. There are very few people who are willing to put in time if they aren't getting something for it.
Hopefully the new staff are more transparent and it seems that their announced 450 USD a month would just about cover their server costs so perhaps there's some altruism there.