Yes, we could theoretically use 4 SOL from our own wallets of course, however we want this to be community driven. You can think of it as a sort of donations system, we're giving people the opportunity to donate to help get this system started and in exchange will reward them later down the road. We want this to be as self-sustainable as possible, so we ideally want a situation where everything is at least net 0 in terms of spend, with any excess revenue reinvested into Solana projects (like this one, others we are building, or through treasury/airdrops).

Of course, we already have other costs such as running servers and running our faucet. We're already giving away Solana basically for free and at a loss through these other services, and we need to draw the line somewhere so that we don't continuously use up our Solana. We find that our SOL reserves would be better spent as donations to the treasury we are building to fund community ecosystem development than just for our own project.

Also, I would think to ask for 4000 SOL (close to a million dollars) would be a bit excessive, but crowdfunding like $1000 is easier, more productive, and more likely to actually happen.

If you have the necessary funds for us to launch, we would happily accept your donation and would thank you for your generosity.