I've noted a few people assuming the male pronoun. It may have been an intentional misdirection at the time, but I do recall my guy had expressed mild amazement that the developer he'd been talking to was a female.

That aside ... :)

We hadn't talked cash at all, it hadn't even gotten that far.

I would speculate, thinking back at it, that I'd have been happy to throw somewhere around $10k at them. I'd just managed to save about $150k on MS licences, so my budget was looking healthy, and TrueCrypt solved a goodly number of our regulatory problems.

As I mentioned above we were in the very early stages, and were likely couching the arrangement in terms of a donation (in return for some vague assurances of assistance if it all went titsup).