Assuming that, you'd think the author of this codebase would have done some sort of calculation on expected daily return from renting a botnet created via this

Assuming that, you'd think the author of this codebase would have done some sort of calculation on expected daily return from renting a botnet created via this software, and priced it accordingly. There is a calculation similar to what I described to determine what a successful poker bot is worth. Otherwise it would make more sense to just run it themselves -- although that would of course expose them to [more] legal risk. Reminds me of bitcoin mining -- can you make more money selling ASIC miners or just mining BTC with the ones that you've built?