A typical programmer costs around the price of about 80k a year (that's low for Silicon Valley too). Which comes out to about 37 an hour. All companies need to pay for benefits, overhead, rent, electricity, etc on TOP of paying out a employee. So normally you would charge a rate around 2 to 3 times the salary of a employee. That's already around 114 an hour, or 240k a year. And there's already more than one employee working on the bitcoin forums... so yea.
With all due respect, that sounds disturbingly like naive and commercially inexperienced programmer accounting and not real world business accounting.
I currently employ twelve developers, run two software development companies and have been doing that kind of things for many years. From my perspective the figures you're quoting here are nonsense.
Maybe it makes some sense if you can only employ people from California, one of the most expensive places on Earth for this kind of thing by the way. But even then it's a pretty generous arrangement.
I don't care how you cut it:
If anyone thinks a million dollars is in any way appropriate - or frankly even $350k - for a custom forum build then I've got a bridge or two I'd like to sell them.
I think the forum does need a bridge.
It's time all us trolls get something over our heads!
I'm curious if the price was fiat or XBT. The way the exchange rate is going nowadays who knows it might end up costing more then 5000XBT.
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