> 1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contractor separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the or

> 1) They said that the favicon was not quoted from the contractor separately. Clearly the listed price is from some weird government formula. (Although, the original document DOES list it separately) Exactly. The government paid for a website maintenance contract. This was some of the maintenance done. They probably divided the maintenance done by the fee paid to arrive at the figure quoted. This doesn't account for the actual bulk of the maintenance expense, which is "being on call for maintenance requests". I paid for a snow-plowing contract this year. There has not been much snow. Accordingly, I've paid hundreds of dollars per snow-plowing actually performed. This doesn't make it a bad deal, because the service I paid for is actually not "come and plow x times", it's "come and plow as many times as required for the year". TL;DR: There's no story here, at all. Zero. At no point in time did anyone write a cheque for 585 pounds for a favicon. It's conceivable that the government overpaid for the whole website maintenance contract but there's zero evidence of that being true. Everyone commenting should be embarrassed.