> For most of the project, I was sitting on a bunch of partially-complete tasks. The cost of reassigning half-done work and spinning up a new vendor would be almost as expensive as starting over from scratch.

The original project budget was 7k, and you ended up spending 46k, for something that didn't really deliver on what you asked for originally.

It is really hard to imagine that it would have been more expensive to start over. It seemed clear by the middle of the story, that web agency wasn't doing what you were paying them for, at which point you increased the amount you were paying them in hope that would somehow change things, and then were shocked when they behaved exactly the same as they had before.

There's times when starting over is more expensive, this seems like the polar opposite of that and a clear example of sunk cost fallacy.