Yikes, that's just as expensive (or more so) than having the quilting done by someone else. At that price, you could pay someone to do some pretty nice quilting for day's worth of doing it yourself. ;)
I'd found a lady who was going to rent time to me in between her own work - would have worked out pretty well for both of us. $10 an hour and I figured I would spend two or three days a month there, so $160-240 a month for letting me use her machine on days when she wasn't using it. At $10/hr, I'd be paying the same as having someone else do the quilting, but at the low end, which I wouldn't mind so much. A newbie is going to be slower, tie up your machine for longer, etc.
But, she never got back to me and now I'm thinking maybe I just need to bite the bullet and get my own darn long arm. I don't have the budget and I don't really have the room, but jeepers, I could easily get financing and my heavy-stuff-moving angel would help me make room. At least that way, I could count on the machine being there whenever I was ready.