You say that now, but in my experience most people able to shell out this kind of money very often doesn't really have a clue about what it is they actually need and have no reasonable go to market strategy beyond "let's just build it and they will come", and then it fails spectacularly.

I've been on the receiving money end of this kind of project several times in the past and as much as you try to help and guide, there's almost always an atmosphere of "I'm the one paying the invoice so let's just do as I say" even though everything points to them being absolutely wrong.

I've also been on projects like this where the buyer has a strong vision, is able to communicate it, but is also very hands off when it comes to implementation. With regular reporting (weekly or bi-weekly being ideal) to do course correcting they've gotten tremendous value out of the $100k-$300k spend.

To be fair, being a buyer for tech projects is really quite difficult – especially if you don't have a very clear and communicable vision of the end goal.

Heh. I worked with a guy that dropped at least 200K on his "prototype." The prototype was a mock up of the product, which looked like it worked if you moved through the demo in exactly the right way. It was all hard coded. He said it was a bargain, since it let him raise real money (a couple of million.) Of course, he spent all that too, along with most of his life savings. The company got no real traction and was eventually sold in a fire sale.

Well if you want some numbers - I was on the board of some real-estate business with around 350 units. They had this ancient website with a basic web form for potential tenants. Just a simple application where you entered your name and information, what type of apartment you'd like, and that would get sent to the operations manager as a PDF file. It was probably made in the early 00s.

The owners wanted something similar, but new looking - so really no added new functionality. Just a design do over, along with better hosting (the webpage was being hosted on the local server of the original designer, some retired dude in his 70s. If you wanted any changes, you'd have to call him and he'd apply changes to the HTML files).

Our cheapest option was a local student who'd charge us $3k for the job. But the owners wanted "24/7 support", so that went out the window.

Next in line, a local design shop quoted us around $7k. Still, no VIP support or whatever. And we'd still have to deal with hosting ourselves.

I had gotten a bunch of other quotes in the same ballpark, but the owner apparently knew a guy in one of the larger IT consulting firms, and they'd offer to do the job for a cool $20k (or around that ballpark), which came with 24/7 support and hosting for a around $2k / year. So they went for that.

Remember, this was just a simple landing page with a typical signup form, and a "modern design". Nothing more, nothing less. Total visitors a year? Probably under 1000.

I can only imagine the prices if they'd want some web app with user registration, login, tools, and what not. I can easily see some consulting firm charging hundreds of thousands for that kind of stuff.

It probably looks like this:

Use real-time APIs to find the best price from: Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia One, Scott’s Cheap Flights, Priceline, Hotwire, Google Flights, Hertz, Kayak.

Sync up flights with hotels and rental cars.

Add 15% to everything, book and resell automatically, making it look like it all came from your app.

That 300K is all gone into the backend in a flash.

I got $1,000. What am I going to get from you? Nothing is not an acceptable response.