A reference could be the cost of Estonian digital services which include e-signatures, and are reasonably efficient:
https://e-estonia.com/e-governance-saves-money-and-working-hours/ "Estonian public sector annual costs for IT systems are 100M Euros in upkeep and 81M Euros in investments"
So in Estonia it's ~1.3B spend for 7y. Switzerland is 7x larger population, and has higher salaries, let's say 2x larger. This puts the cost at 18B Eur.
Putting a cost on each signature does not make sense of course, it's probably just easier for the government to justify the spending this way, rather then discussing specifics of the budget.
19 bn$ for e-signatures for the Swiss administration?
My gut feeling is, LW is a fine place to ask this - keen to remove if instead it's off topic.
I'm confused reading
This is for a 7-year period, with a total of some 120 million signatures & seals of various types (if I understand it correctly):
The article I have this from (German) (EN translation), discusses a few details, incl. difference seals vs. signatures. But I don't fully understand it. In particular, I see nothing that provides me with a true grasp of why anything near 17 bn Swiss francs (19 bn USD) would be a plausible cost for that service for Switzerland's government.
Does anyone have any understanding whether the order of magnitude of the cost really may be a plausibly reasonable upper bound, rather than simply an hugely overpriced service? If so, could you give your two cents? (pun unintended, but now that it's here, the question may be rephrased: why does it, per signature, not have to be only 2 cents or so, but instead many francs?)
I guess mostly irrelevant background: Switzerland has around 9 million citizens.