Originally Posted by Libertine

If you think that's a lot for a project like this, either you have very little experience with coding larger projects, or you are severely underpricing your services.

If you price yourself at $50 an hour, and charge 50% for code you've already written before, there is no way you can do a project like this *well* without going way over $1k. Remember, you also have to add countless little features like validation for all user input, email verfication, password retrieval, tracking comments per user, etc.

Scrap all the social features, and it becomes a lot cheaper. But with those included, $1k would be a really, really low price for a custom script like this.