> This became a full-time job for a handful of our most senior engineers, and resulted in a six month project before we were ready to put it through our QA testing.

So let's say that you pay your senior engineers $150k, 6 months is $75k per engineer, say 3-5 engineers, that's $225-375k. Plus QA time, etc.

It might have cost the company $500k just to implement a program that would reduce their revenue by letting people by in at a lower price.

I'm not saying this is the case here, but I often see companies I've worked for not do this kind of math, the opportunity cost of implementing a feature or product.