No need to apologise.
A couple of things.
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I give a 20% discount for open source projects. This can be increased in special cases.
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I’ve had some success in the past crowdfunding funds from multiple people who want to see the plugin come to life
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You could either make your feature list generic enough that it would be applicable to other communities who might be interested in sponsoring it
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You could raise the funds from your community members
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Alternatively, you could hire a non-discourse-specific developer, or a discourse developer with less experience, to work on it for a lower rate. I doubt whether you’ll get it done for $200, but you could potentially get it done more cheaply.
The downside of this is approach is that the Discourse codebase is large, multifaceted and changes. My rate reflects the length of time I’ve been working with that codebase and how this reflects in the quality of the code, the stability over time and the support I can give.