Depends on what you define as an indie title I suppose. There is a lot of games, that were fininacial successes, with a shoestring budget, such as FTL or Space Pirates and Zombies 1. Unless you are only counting indie titles as ones made in UE4 or Unity, then perhaps then, it might take 500K+ to make them.
$25 beta access is expensive, sure, but, its cheaper than say doing beta access for 3DXChat, which is $30 a month, and they go sometimes for 6+ months with no new content updates. Also, this site is for pirating it, so most people who grab the downloads are not paying anything.