Email migration cost

Hourly pricing sounds fairer and behaves worse. The bulk of migration effort is discovery: finding every alias, every forwarding rule, every domain-wide share and every recurring calendar event whose organiser left two years ago. Under an hourly model, the messier your estate, the more you pay and the less incentive anyone has to work through it quickly.

A per-mailbox price puts that risk on us. It also produces a number you can take to a budget holder before any work starts, which is usually the actual blocker on getting a migration approved.

First, archive volume. Mailboxes above roughly 50GB take materially longer to transfer and verify, and the throughput ceiling is set by the source platform's API rather than by anything we control. Second, litigation holds and regulated archives, where the obligation is to prove chain of custody rather than simply move data.

Third, Exchange public folders, which have no lossless Google equivalent and require a mapping decision per folder tree. Fourth, split delivery: above roughly 150 mailboxes we recommend staging the move by department, which reduces blast radius but adds coordination weeks.

Platform licences are billed by the vendor or your existing reseller, not by us, and we do not mark them up. Third-party migration tooling used during the project is included. Bespoke integration development, directory rewrites and application changes are not, because those are separate projects wearing a migration costume.

Out-of-hours emergency work outside an agreed cutover window is charged at 1.5 times the standard hourly rate. The cutover weekend itself is not out-of-hours work; it is the plan.

When comparing migration quotes, the number to interrogate is not the headline rate but what happens after cutover. A quote that ends at the MX change is cheaper because it stops before the expensive week. Ask specifically whether delta syncs are included, how many, and how long support runs afterwards.

The second question worth asking is who runs the work. A price that assumes an offshore delivery team you will never speak to is a different product from one where the person on the scoping call is the person doing the migration.