I'm completely ignorant on how much this kind of stuff costs. How much would you "wild ballpark guess" that a DDOS like this would cost, and how much would the DDOS protection cost? And who would you pay the DDOS protection cost to? Your server hosting company?
$200 dollars wouldn't get you much protection tbh, in fact $400 dollars would only get you slight protection, if you wanted something quite substantial like 10gbps of sin flood filtering then you would either need good friends or very deep pockets, 50+gbps and I think you would need the annual turnover of a large corporation to justify the cost.
As a quite rough rule of thumb if you say $1/month per 1mbps of protection might give you an idea of the sort of cost involved.