At $125/hour and $5000 for servers, $10-20k could be spent up in a couple weeks or so. That seems pretty reasonable, and certainly not as absurd as $327 million, which would amount to about 1200 years of FTE effort.

If you were the government or a big company with a reputation would you call up 1 guy and say "you've got a few weeks and 120/hr, make a site and well run it in our data enter"?

Think of all the things that can go wrong! Security, PII, etc.

Ah, I thought your remark was suggesting that it should be even cheaper than $10-20k.