Before you budget
Price follows complexity, not size
The instinct is to price a migration by gigabytes or by user count. Both mislead. A two-terabyte file-share move with no custom code is calmer and cheaper than a 200 GB site weighed down by forty InfoPath forms and a dozen custom solutions. What sets the price is how much was built on top of SharePoint (customizations, forms, workflows), because none of that moves automatically. Each piece is rebuilt by hand.
| Pricing model | When it is honest |
|---|---|
| Fixed price | One number for the whole project. Carries a 10–15% risk premium. Worth it once the scope is genuinely known. |
| Time & materials | Hourly. The right model for rebuilding customizations, where the scope cannot be known until the work is underway. |
| Per gigabyte | Around $0.10–$0.50/GB. Honest only for plain content. A whole-project per-GB quote is a red flag. It ignores the work that actually costs money. |
How to use this guide
- 1Find your bandsimple, moderate, or complex (page 3)
- 2Read the rangewhat the work costs, and where the money goes
- 3Scope your ownfill the worksheet, then bring real numbers to a call
Section one
What it costs
Planning ranges in Canadian dollars for a SharePoint 2016/2019 → SharePoint Online migration. All-in covers consulting labour plus migration tooling; ongoing Microsoft 365 licensing is separate (see page 5). These are planning bands. Your real number comes from the worksheet on page 6.
| Organization | Consulting & migration labour | All-in (incl. tooling) |
|---|---|---|
| Very small 10–50 users |
$8,000–$25,000 | $12,000–$35,000 |
| Small / mid 50–250 users |
$25,000–$75,000 | $35,000–$110,000 |
| Mid 250–1,000 users |
$75,000–$200,000 | $110,000–$300,000+ |
Find your band
Size sets the floor; complexity sets where you land in the range.
| Band | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Simple | A few site collections, under 500 GB, no custom solutions, fewer than five InfoPath forms and five workflows. Weeks of work, mostly tool-driven. |
| Moderate | Five to twenty-five site collections, some branding or sandboxed solutions, 5–25 forms, 5–25 workflows. Two to four months. |
| Complex | Custom farm solutions, 25+ forms or workflows, a full redesign. Four to six months or more, and the top of the range, or past it. |
The quick test: count your custom solutions, InfoPath forms, and workflows. Near zero puts you in Simple no matter how many gigabytes you hold. A large total in any one puts you in Complex.
Section two
Where the money goes
A rough split of a typical project budget, and the factors that move your number the most.
| Component | Share of budget |
|---|---|
| Discovery & assessment | 15–20% |
| Content migration | 25–35% |
| Rebuilding customizations, forms & workflows | 20–30%; higher on complex projects |
| Testing & validation | 10–15% |
| Training & change management | 10–15% |
| Project management | 5–10% |
| Contingency | Add 10% on top. Do not bury it |
What moves your number most
- Custom solutions Farm solutions and master pages do not move. Each is rebuilt with the SharePoint Framework or retired. The single biggest swing. It can multiply a project.
- InfoPath forms No converter exists; every form is rebuilt by hand in Power Apps or Microsoft Forms. Often the largest single line item.
- 2010 / 2013 workflows Already retired in SharePoint Online. Each one still needed is rebuilt in Power Automate.
- Permission complexity Broken inheritance and orphaned accounts are untangled by hand. Inherited and "deny" permissions do not migrate.
- Redesign vs lift-and-shift Rethinking site structure rather than moving it as-is adds roughly 1.5–2.5× the labour.
- Content volume What clients fixate on, and the cheapest part of the job. Gigabytes set the timeline. They do not set the price.
Section three
Lower the number before you start
Most of what makes a migration expensive can be reduced before you hire anyone. Each action below genuinely cuts the bill.
- Archive dead content. Typically 30–60% of an old environment is stale. Every gigabyte you leave behind is saved.
- Decommission unused sites. Fewer sites means less to provision, validate, and pay for.
- Retire forms and workflows nobody uses. Each one retired removes the most expensive per-item work entirely.
- Clean up permissions and sync identities to Microsoft Entra ID first. A tidy permission model migrates automatically instead of by hand.
- Run an SPMT scan yourself. Microsoft's free SharePoint Migration Tool scans your farm and inventories customizations, large lists, and forms. Real numbers shrink paid discovery.
- Keep the low-skill work in-house. Content sign-off, testing, and training done by your team can cut 15–30% off the fee.
Costs that surprise people
- Premium connectors A rebuilt form or flow that reaches data outside SharePoint needs a paid Power Platform licence: about CAD $20 per user per month, ongoing.
- Storage overages Years of file-share sprawl and version history can run past your included storage. Extra space is roughly CAD $300 per terabyte per month.
- Third-party add-ons On-prem tools (Nintex, e-signature, intranet web parts) need new cloud subscriptions, sometimes with no direct equivalent.
- The cost of delay Running unsupported past July 14, 2026 means extended dual-running and harder cyber-insurance renewals. The July 1, 2026 Microsoft price rise (~8–12% on most plans) is one more reason not to wait.
Section four
Scope your own migration
19 fields
Fill this in before your first call. Most of it is counts and yes/no. An SPMT scan gives you the rest. Walk into a discovery call with this done and the conversation starts with real numbers, not guesses.
A · Your environment
B · Customizations
C · Forms & workflows
D · Permissions & approach
If you would rather not guess
A fixed-fee assessment turns the worksheet into a real number.
This guide gets you a planning range. The reason it is a range and not a number is that every migration hides 20–30% more complexity than anyone estimates from the outside. TenantCraft's Migration Readiness Assessment ($4,900, fixed, a five-day engagement) turns your worksheet into a scoped plan and a firm quote, so the project you sign has no surprises in it. A discovery call is free, 25 minutes, and ends with a written scope, not a sales pitch.
- Web
- tenantcraft.ca
- hello@tenantcraft.ca
- Discovery call
- Free · 25 minutes
Guide last reviewed May 16, 2026. Cost ranges are planning estimates in Canadian dollars and vary with the factors on page 4. SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 reach end of support on July 14, 2026. The realistic window to scope and complete a migration is closing.