Too many people these days think they are entitled to everything for free, especially on the internet. I dabble in angel investing and you wouldn't believe how many people think they are entitled an investment because they think they have "the next big thing" -- if they are so sure, bootstrap it and prove it!

I apologize, I probably should have been more clear about this point. I do not at all believe that I am in any way entitled to things for free. I myself am in computer science and contributed to OSS and get annoyed by people frequently thinking that software/services have no value just because they are getting used to having things for free.

That being said, I did consider that there are many (more or less successful) business models centered around services that are (partially) free for end-users (e.g. social networks, email, ...). I have not yet founded any startup myself, so I don't want to lean myself out of the window and claim that something like that would be successful for business this.

We (the group of people wanting to conduct the polls) are students. It's not like there wouldn't be a budget for something like this; but a lot of the good services have high per-poll or monthly rates.

So my question was not why someone isn't doing a lot of work to provide me with a quality service, but more: Why isn't there anything between [free + basically broken] and [amazing + highly priced]. Why is there nothing in between? Is there no market for a middle segment? This I believe to be a valid question.

That is a much better question. Although I can't tell you why in this specific scenario, I can tell you that middle markets can be tough because they're not the cheapest or the most expensive, which are two common selling points.