this makes me think of Spaceballs. Just comb the desert.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and defend this. (I have nothing whatsoever to do with the site or the company, which I've never heard of)

Is this site not much more than a CMS with some cool extras? Yes. But only on the surface.

This is a site that receives a ton of traffic. You know, the kind of site that needs a larger infrastructure than your blog about your family. This is also a site that likely takes a large amount of resources to manage on an ongoing basis. There is a lot of cost in doing that.

Also, the 18M is for the life of the contract I would assume. So for however long they agreed to run the thing is how long that 18M needs to last for the duration of the contract.

This is also a government website. These sites come under attack much more often than your normal site. The security that needs to be in place for this just isn't that cheap. And any updates done to the code during the life of the project have to go thru security audits. It is simply a lot more time consuming to do.

I dunno. Playing devils advocate. How about ask the slashdot creators what they would charge to build and run slashdot for 2-3 years.

I'm a small developer. I know I could have built this site for a lot cheaper too until I think about it. I just don't have the resources to build and maintain something of that magnitude. It would take a large effort to do, especially in a small time frame.

And lets imagine for a minute that this did go thru a bidding process. This company was probably on the cheaper end of things.