stepollo said in our discord its for two main reasons "the project is still alive" and "I feel I can trust BBP developers"
and in direct message before he said "some small projects dont have the money to afford these update costs" "have no money/dont want to pay are different stories"
The guy who ran the MasternodeMeBro tournament (and works for Bulwark coin) recently interviewed them:
https://briandcolwell.com/2019/01/cryptobridge-the-premier-bitshares-gateway/.html
I submitted some questions to him to ask, Im surprised they answered them and answered them honestly:
https://twitter.com/togoshigekata/status/1085312781539266563
In the past, we’ve had free updates and we were overrun by coin teams requesting updates, giving us often inferior code to compile resulting in added effort on our side.
In addition, a lot of these forks ended up causing huge issues for the support team as not all users were informed that there had been a fork.
People continued to try to deposit into CryptoBridge using outdated wallets or depositing into addresses that were no longer valid.
The manual process of retrieving those funds and crediting to the users really increased the required workload to support a fork.
Ever since, we decided to charge for forks and swaps in order to split the added costs with the coins that request it.
Non-consensus updates 30 days apart are always free as there is almost no additional effort on our side to install it.