I've been in a situation before where a company was being quoted 20k for one new system build out by an outside agency to work on their ruby site. They wanted an events page with an admin back end. Instead I hired a Junior PHP dev for them making 75/year who converted the entire existing site in 8 weeks and then proceeded to build the same events functionality for a fraction of the cost and then went onto building the wish list of features they wanted over the next year. If they went with the outside agency they'd have spent 300k and probably not even had a good outcome. This was 10 years ago though so inflate everything I said across the board by 25%.

You're searching in one website which is intended for freelancers, that's not exactly a good representation of the software industry.