$400k in the context of custom development, testing, and administration? That's cheap. And frankly this approach is much more appropriate than the alternatives of defense contractor pork, defective-by-design consumer "cloud", or having people manually do rounds and record numbers.

Also if you want to claim some high ground about not "wasting money", I don't know why you'd use an example of buying Chineseum from overpriced Amazon rather than getting it drop shipped.