Yeah I find it hilarious as a contract developer how just because it's government software that means you can charge like 200 times more for essentially the same software any other client could get for like 1 million at most.

I've been doing contract development for a little over 10 years now and even the most complex projects were never even remotely that expensive. And Im sure I've probably written at least 85% of the same functionality of whatever that software does. Hell, I'm sure there is probably open source software that does similar

Prices of that nature usually include 10-20 year service contracts and onsite maintainers, to include hardware. Not that the prices are not still inflated, but the reality of running a contractually 99.99% uptime, multi decade, and completely backwards compatible platform is not trivial, or anything south of multi millions of dollars at the federal scale especially.

So glad I pay taxes