Yes, that's extremely cheap. In Chicago, there was a system being developed in partnership with University of Chicago to make city-owned database schemas open

Yes, that's extremely cheap. In Chicago, there was a system being developed in partnership with University of Chicago to make city-owned database schemas open to the public through a PHP web app. The system cost 300k to develop, was never finished, and was quietly put into forever-maintenance mode after a few years of use. As a general rule, Government is pretty bad with tech projects and their associated costs.