It's funny to see many people giving their "expert" opinion about how expensive your web site was, just by looking the design. It is very easy to say when:
1. You are not the one developing the site, thus You have no commitment.
2. You ignore all the other project requirements (already mentioned above) just by looking to the presentation layer.
If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.
Sure, but from the looks of things this is a pretty generic web site. If you have been doing development for a while that figure would be an instant red flag. Not blaming either party.
The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.
So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.
For all you know that figure could have been made up.
If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.