Hahah, damn that sounds terrible! As it is right now, it'd cost $100 USD for me to submit my game to Steam Direct and I doubt I'd ever recoup the money (this is a short Game-Jam project). But I'll let you in on a little secret: just wait for the itch.io sale to end and the game will go back it's free/donation state. I only started charging because I wanted to try and get the game promoted via the sale. Turns out it hasn't really done anything in terms of views/downloads so I'll be reverting it at the end of the promotion.
Sorry for the inconvenience!