Could be worse and they drop support for the forum entirely. A well read woodworking magazine publisher did that with a popular forum as a cost cutting measure. Lost a lot of long time subscribers, including me. Much like here, forum members posted projects, ideas and help to anyone who needed it. There was only minimal activity on it by the magazine editors.
You make good points. Operating forums isn't free but isn't tons of money either. That is, unless you'd done a bunch of customizations and then move servers a few times. Then is becomes a lot of work and money. Heartland just moved web hosts for the factory sites and I had to move to the same new server. It's cost about $2k in fees so far. When you move servers, things just break.
That all said, I continue to count my blessings that Heartland still sees the Heartland Owners Forum as a net positive asset to the brand and as such, they continue to approve my budgets to operate it, operate the Club (big bucks for that) and pay me to pull the strings.
JohnDar - thank you for recognizing the value of what HL is providing us here and pointing it out here.
Much delayed is our move to a new forum platform. It's still on my list. Hoping to rebudget for that this summer and move into a new platforum this fall/winter. Here again, another several $k to stand that up, program it, test it, migrate users and threads over, more testing, more tweaking, but it will set us up nicely for the next decade.