Hmmm... I dunno how they came up with their valuation for the the process, but I can estimate what I might do if I were the tech support for a customer of mine that had a similar situation.

My guess is that the user name is probably used as a key in a lot of the database tables, so there are a number of data rows that will have to be changed, the new user name will have to be checked for uniqueness, the change will have to be synced with the timing of the process that allows new users to sign up, and probably will have to be synced with the backup routine. All of this can be automated of course, but for a user with hundreds of images, a similar amount of purchases, and a large number of forum posts, there's a lot of data to sync up for that one name change; the name change may run for a while and either a very smart program will have to schedule it or it will have to be manually scheduled by someone.

An important design criteria would be that the change occurs so as not to incur massive table locks, thus slowing the system down when it runs (Lord, please save us from slowdowns during updates, amen). I probably would spend a lot of hours coding and testing the new procedures, because of course, I wouldn't want to crash the system or prevent a user from being able to log back in later.

Let's say I spend 20 hours writing, debugging, and testing the new feature. I bill out at $120 per hour, which is 2,400 bucks. That figure would probably be higher if using an independent consultant, lower per hour cost but maybe more hours with an in-house team (because of other development priorities). So, roughly, it costs say a couple of thousand dollars to implement the new feature, and maybe a little to administer and keep an eye on it every so often. I have absolutely no idea how much adding such a feature actually cost them here, but that's an example what might be involved.

Since, as mentioned, R'osity is a business, and there is some cost involved in adding new features, part of the sales price of the feature is almost certainly to defray that development cost. I can also see the logic in pricing a feature to discourage frivolous use of it. Again, I have no idea if that's what they're doing, but I can imagine a business choosing to use that as an impetus for setting a pricing structure.

Captain Jack