[rty32]

Cost is not just salary. To begin with, health insurance and other benefits. And they'll need dev environments, they may need additional cloud resources depending on how the project goes, and there will be additional overhead when the team interacts with other departments.

[tauntz]

OP is in Europe - no idea in which country but just as an anecdotal example, building a world-class dev team in Estonia is ~100k per senior engineer (total cost, including health insurance etc). Of course there are auxiliary costs in addition to the team itself but not anywhere close to 4.5 mil/year for a 5 person team.

And to be honest, I'm not convinced a moderately complex in-house crud app would really require 5 senior developers but impossible to have a strong opinion on that based on the details that OP provided. It might be a one man job, it might take a team of 10..

[jon-wood]

I agree that the cost seems overblown but having worked on several very small teams I'd be hesitant to start anything new with fewer than four people. It is possible to get things done with a one or two person team, it's just a lot harder because the moment someone gets sick or goes on holiday everything grinds to a halt. If what the team is working on is on the critical path for doing business it effectively becomes impossible for anyone to have a real holiday, if something breaks then they're going to get roped in to fix it regardless.

If you have a four person team you drastically reduce the bus factor. It also means you can have people routinely pairing on things which can be hugely impactful when working on new software in a new domain like this.

[wordofx]

So you’ve barely added anything to the cost on top of salary. Depending on where you live in the world there is no extra costs on insurance or other benefits. Cloud resources on a brand new app in development? Let’s be generous and say 100k/yr for the first year. (If they were using more than that I would fire them as they clearly have no idea what they are doing)

But let’s say they have a 5 man team for in-house development. 1.5m/yr would be a stretch to spend.