I am one of the notaries who pays to have his node maintained.  My rationale behind this is,  my service provider has much more experience in network adminstration and infosec than i do and has demonstrated that he can keep up with updates, notarizations and respond in an attack scenario, which he did during the coin creation attack early in komodo's history.

The Notary Node funds that have been produced by my node have been used for many different Komodo related things including:

-Coinpayments.net integration

-Having a Komodo Book written for us:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Komodo-Fuel-SuperNET-Concise-History/dp/1981831452

-Conference materials

-Advertising

-Giveaways

Additionally, due to my inability to get a sweepstakes website up and running ( legal issues not technical ),  I am planning to use the remaining funds of the notary year to establish masternodes in various BarterDEX enabled coins, the proceeds of which will be sold at discount on BarterDEX to encourage use of our DEX to many communities.


I wanted to point this out,   as there is there are misconceptions about  some of us notaries that aren't tech gurus, that we just leech the funds for solely personal profit.