Agreed, "spammers" are not the people who use CAPTCHA breaking.
The people that use it have very specific purposes in mind. Spamming through CAPTCHA'd systems makes little sense as it costs too much. That said, there are many businesses, large and small, that use breakers to engage in commerce.
Actually, I managed a reasonably large scale free email operation and spammers DO spend money solving captchas.
We had this issue with spammers where after sending 50 emails a day we would ask users to solve a captcha after each email sent. That didn't work.
Upon further investigation and adding some code to track keypresses, we discovered the reason: it had been humans all along, sending spam semi-manually from a cybercafe/sweatshop in Nigeria using an add-on like Roboform as an aid. And yes, these were the usual H3rb4l V14gr4 spammers as well as some Nigerian Princes.
While there is poverty, Captchas are necessarily broken.
Spammers are the ones who use it extensively and that's why such a service was born. The percentage of people using it for other purposes would be infinitesimally small.
You can't directly attach value to the money they spend on this. They create accounts on many services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc for email spamming and they need to use these services for the tools that they purchased to work. These tools basically automate everything except the captcha solving part.
The people that use it have very specific purposes in mind. Spamming through CAPTCHA'd systems makes little sense as it costs too much. That said, there are many businesses, large and small, that use breakers to engage in commerce.