Beg to differ on both points.

Ignoring the 7 KLOC metric (which is fairly useless in estimating the project value for the customer), $5K at $100/h rate of a senior C programmer on a contract works out to about 6 working days, which is a reasonable timeframe for writing well optimized XML-RPC protocol parser. In other words it's neither a steal nor does it take two months to write.

(edit) YMMV by a programmer, but that's what it would've taken me to write it (though I have written a good deal of protocol parsers).