[Malte Müller]

Yes, it is a lot of money for a website even with a forum. I never had made any in that price area. Maybe over the years with ongoing support but not at once.

But the plain website or its design itself is surely not the reason for this. The main problem is porting all the old data from a “stone age” system that probably even was custom made back then (general CMS like WordPRess did not exist when the site was made). That all needs to be understoond and the everything needs to be converted so it is usable somewhere else. Having user accounts still work and such. And of course if all should be better searchable all that needs to be tagged/sorted etc. Probably a lot manual work needed. Let’s say a web agency works on that wth several people for some weeks it’s nothing. Some FSM comments expect this to be too simple and you cannot have AI do such things if it is not trained for it. Despite that you should not “believe” AI without checking the result.

Also you need to prepared on problems on the way. Sometimes things turn out to be more complicated in areas you didn’t expect them.

And releasing a new CD and a book probably also costs some copyright fees for design, texts and music. Not to speak that he probably like to make a bit of benefit for his own work on all that as well.