"We examined the Courts’ budget documents from the past few years, and we discovered that the Courts claim PACER expenses of roughly $25 million per year. But in 2010, PACER users paid about $90 million in fees to access the system [5]."
I operate PlainSite on a budget of far less than $5,000 per year. It's far more advanced than PACER in a number of ways. Even multiplying PlainSite's budget by a factor of 100 to account for features that PACER has but PlainSite does not, you still get pretty close to zero on a cost-per-page basis.
https://www.recapthelaw.org/2012/01/10/recap-featured-in-xrd...
I operate PlainSite on a budget of far less than $5,000 per year. It's far more advanced than PACER in a number of ways. Even multiplying PlainSite's budget by a factor of 100 to account for features that PACER has but PlainSite does not, you still get pretty close to zero on a cost-per-page basis.