Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not <i>directly</i> 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&#x27;s an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at <i>purely</i> monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is <i>extremely</i> liquid.