Because they were the only qualified bidder.
It was a two-envelope process – one envelope for proposal, the other for finances. Your proposal was scored against criteria and you had to score 75% or higher. Only bidders who scored that high had their financial envelope opened. Hence only then did the TTC know each bid amount.
For the Web-site redesign, there was one qualified bidder, Devlin. Only its financial envelope was opened. (TTC told me that to my face and in writing.) There was no occasion to select the lowest bidder because there was only one bidder. This explains why Devlin’s overbudget bid had to be accepted.
I presume that Devlin was unique in actually costing out some of the nonsense requested in the RFP, including text-to-speech and machine translations. I have no evidence of that yet. Another effect of this procedure is that nobody at the TTC knows what the other bid amounts were.
And there I was thinking some kind of funny business was afoot. I have no reason to think the evaluation process was anything less than aboveboard.