If you point him here, we can discuss a spec in more detail (we can move this thread to a private area if preferred).

Basically, I need a site where people log in, are given a unique ID and password, they then register various details which are held in a database that we can report against. They can go back and amend these details at a later date if need be.

Does this sound difficult to you?

It didn't to me, yet they reckon they've been quoted 25k by a 3rd party developer to build the site.

I'm open to cheaper offers :)

The precise implementation will depend on exactly what details need to be held against a user's account. For instance Novacaster's user record fields are currently:

username
password
real name
email address
postal address
postcode
country
phone
fax/mobile
website
company name
info (ie a space for a chunk of descriptive text)

Also important to specify are: what defines an event (venue, date, type of meal, price, discount, description ?), what interaction does a user have with an event (book tickets, cancel, one at a time or more ?), and what types of reports are desired (how many vegetarians are attending, how many spaces are left ?). These reports need to be clearly defined in advance so that the right information is captured to start with.

We price Novacaster sites on an initial setup and development cost, plus an annual maintenance fee (which covers support, upgrades and hosting).

A large chunk of the initial cost tends to go on the look and feel work. People can get quite finnicky about that aspect, which means lots of hours tweaking if a customer isn't quite sure what they want. My advice is always "focus on the functionality first, look and feel second".

The 25K quoted may be because the extent of the spec demands that much work - there's not currently enough for me to go on to know whether we're talking about 3, 10 or 30 days development effort.

Hope this is useful, if we can't help maybe JHT would be worth talking to.

--
simon