If your company were writing this software what would they charge for it for a normal customer (let’s assume they didn’t know it was the federal government)?
Honestly, I’d have to see the specs before I figured out a price. And I’ve never worked for the government before, and I would assume doing so would have its own inherent costs.
That said, I’d estimate the front end work to be the easy part of the job. The UI itself is pretty simple. Most of the work would be on the back end, getting a middle layer to work between the DBs and the front end. But that’s the kind of thing we’re asked to do all the time - develop the proper data model, get good APIs, etc.
PMing, QA, testing, sandbox environments - all that happy horse shi’ite - this feels like a $10-50 million job for me, gut. In the $100 million range, I’d start to feel a bit like I was taking the government on a major ride. Over $650 million? You gotta be essing me. I wish I could convey to everyone here just how big of a sh*tbox the US taxpayer got for that kind of money: describing it as paying for a brand-new Ferrari and getting a Pontiac Aztec on blocks isn’t being outlandish enough.
I checked out some of the front end subcontractors. To an org, 100% left-wing advocacy online companies.