Depending on the skills needed, a good programmer can charge $100/hr or more. Based on that, $50,000 reflects 500 hours, or about 12 weeks work. Not unreasonable, especially if you find someone with the skill to make the system more responsive and more flexible. I'm an experienced, certified MS Access developer and may be able to help. But, as the saying goes, excellence costs but mediocracy costs more.

Have you ever considered a DYI approach? There is a good relational database program called Filemaker Pro. It is an Apple licensed product but runs on Windows too. I used this some years back while working as a manager in a print company. It is very easy to use but it would take a bit of time to learn. I am sure you could export data from the current database, that's what I did. The current version is reasonably priced, highly rated and very popular.

Not enough information to answer this question. What kind of database is it? Does this include hardware, software, and support costs. How many records do you have in the current database?

The best 'how long is a piece of string?' question I've seen in a long time. If it's a day's work for one person, you're being fleeced. If it's a month for a team of 5, you're getting off quite lightly.

So how many person hours are they looking to put in? What does that work out at, as an hourly rate? Does that seem reasonable? And are they providing any hardware or software upgrades (with associated costs) included in the price?

Those are your questions.

@irascible
@resserts
@Iamnobody

"we put the database on the Site5 server with the D website in about 2012. In 2015, M--- upped the server plan to the more expensive VPS plan - $700 a year as opposed to the $125 we were paying - per the recommendation of Site5. M--- found that we didn't need the VPS plan so cancelled it in 2016. The programmer re-wrote some coding and we've been going along ok with the cheaper plan, until NOW. The database was originally written in 2003 so the entire database is outdated and we really need to come up to speed. We REALLY need a programmer ... I have money in the budget BUT to get an independent programmer to do the work is ASTRONOMICAL! I've had quotes ranging from $25,000 to $50,000! Errrr....NOT in the budget <g>!

Gee, seems excessive but then again, maybe more details would help. What is the nature of the update? If you can share more specifics

Are you migrating it to the cloud?

As in database version and OS upgrade? Very high quote if it’s just one server. But otherwise I agree with @resserts

What sort of updates are required? Although that sounds like a lot of money to me, if it's an update to the database and the interface for working with the data, that may be reasonable. There are other reasons, too, that it might be that high, like if the data itself has to be restructured and normalized for use with a new system or to provide faster, more reliable access. These are just a couple of reasons it might be tens of thousands of dollars, especially if it's an especially large data set.