Well, I'm not hearing you suggesting an alternative. And I think it's better to host somewhere else than by raising the costs for your instance admins.
Hosting somewhere else is absolutely fine, probablem is imgur itself, how about webhotpix.com or postimages.org?
Imgur turned out to be problematic for a number of reasons in the past and they also want to get paid for API pulls and let's be real, we all are here because we don't like API costs...