[kbenson]

Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not directly from 18F. 18F has heavily promoted recently, and that along with them being a part of the government and the project being open source all contributed to the volunteer feeling it was a worthwhile endeavor at that price. It's an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at purely monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is extremely liquid.