To set the tone, this post is not about hating on for profit services on Steem. They are valuable, they show how easy it is to start a project on Steem, how it generates (very volatile) revenue and how it rewards the creators handsomely too. While there will always be for profit companies and middlemen, I don't believe they will last as long on Steem if everything goes according to the way some investors imagine it will.
The cost of maintaining your witness servers, your own nodes and front-end costs might at some place in time be lower than the witness rewards to all in the top 100.
I understand some services may need some help, maybe self-vote a bit more than usual or delegate to a bot, but that is one of the advantages of Steem. Being able to adapt and survive much better than 99% of other projects/companies in the "real world". Of course for some it won't be enough and they may take a break or shut down completely, but for many of them it's just a waiting game and they may understand the volatile markets most of these projects in the crypto space are facing.
Once/if Steem starts going up, I am much more looking forward to the ideas that will come to life which are unique from current apps existing in the centralized world. Those who rely only on adrevenue and do whatever they can to make sure that revenue keeps on coming, so much so that they silence and ban users not following their narrative or someone else's in power. Ideas that simply can't be re-created on platforms that only rely on ad revenue and the rules advertisers bring with them. Ideas that integrate their reward pool in more ways than we can even begin to understand or think of right now.
At that point in time we won't need someone to do things for us, a middleman to redirect votes for a fee to sellers or a middleman to lease out your SP. For every project there will be a competitor undercutting them. Some may do it just cause they can, some will do it for attention, experiments, what happens if's. My point is that these projects will all compete towards non-profit and show to the world that it is possible to run projects that anyone anywhere can use and earn from without there being an entity profiting off of each activity. The higher the price of Steem goes, the lower they can place their profit % (if they want to), of course there will be the Apple's of Steem blockchain that may never lower their profits but keep insisting you need to buy a new account if your old one is "broken".
This is why I stayed interested in blockchain and one thing that drew me to Steem - no middlemen, no fees. I am looking forward to that future. This is why I often try and some times fail to create non-profit projects, it's not just a 1 for me, 1 for steem thing. I just want to see that future appear faster. It would be a good start if more people thought about giving back to Steem every now and then, though.
PS. Why have we not perfected cryogenic freezing for humans yet?