The app development itself cost only 4 Million. The rest is the projected total cost through 2021 including the server infrastructure and especially the call center support, which takes about 2000 calls a day.

That’s a pretty large AWS bill too. But I didn’t realize it covered a call center. Those are definitely quite expensive.

> That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US.

It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)

Well, it’s pretty close to my salary. But I work in government.

> Well, it’s pretty close to my salary. But I work in government.

Sure. But it's probably nowhere close to your salary + benefits + overhead cost to your employer.

My benefits are lousy but the contractor I work for probably charges my employer, yes. 300 engineer years would still be quite a lot too.

> My benefits are lousy but the contractor I work for probably charges my employer, yes.

On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)

Well, there are 2 models of SW development you can use here:

1) 30 top notch engineers to build the MVP and then iterate.

2) 300 engineers - the first 100 to step all over each other trying to build an app and the remaining 200 engineers fixing the bugs from the first 100.

IT salaries in egalitarian Europe are a lot lower than in US.

As an average, I guess it's about right for Germany.