A favicon? That’ll be £585 please.

Ok, lets say it didn't take 5 minutes. Lets say it took 3 hours for a designer to make the favicon pixel by pixel, and 1 hour for a developer to upload the favicon to the server (maybe he only has one arm or something, I don't know, bare with me.) That's ~$230/hr.

Really, you can't argue that this wasn't crazy expensive. However, when it comes to government waste this is a pretty trivial example.

s/\$/£/

Well, you forgot the 2 hour meeting to get approval of everyone involved, then the changes needed after the team weighed in, another meeting for final approval (assuming there was only one round of revisions - this is government here) and then actual implementation. You also forgot the time it took the designer to come up with the original concept - you can't just sit down and produce a production-ready favicon without knowing what it is you're drawing.

So, lets call it 10 hours, roughly? So 58.50/hr...

Some factors to bear in mind before balking:

1) The work was done under a support contract, therefore it was probably billed on time and materials and there may also be a minimum or call-out charge (it's the goal of a lot of companies to be able to charge a daily-rate instead of an hourly one). When they say it's not quoted for separately they mean that they didn't put out an RFP, tender it and agree a fixed price beforehand, they asked Reading Room to do the work under an existing contractual agreement at pre-agreed rates.

2) If the work is of a high priority then the hourly cost is greater.

3) It's a government site therefore they probably have a change management process in place which would mean that before anything touches a production server it has to be signed off. If they do things properly (which I honestly don't believe for a second) then there's no way in the world a developer or designer would be able to touch a production server (let alone two) and this would be someone else's job.

4) the design process may have not been as straightforward as just reducing the size. Perhaps they wanted to try it different colours, etc. ? All we can see is the end result and not the process.

Of course, they may have just been ripped off. But then so have we by making pointless requests under the Freedom of Information Act which isn't going to accomplish anything more than an inflated sense of our own self-worth.

> 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.