Why Our Prices Are Not the Lowest You'll Find

If the quote includes Microsoft 365, Azure, or other Microsoft subscriptions, those lines are Microsoft's published prices, identical to buying direct, and the quote names the monthly Microsoft price list it was built from. Nothing on those lines is marked up.

If the total looks high, you're looking at the services lines. Here is what's in them.

There is no raw material in a migration or a security rollout. No hardware, no inventory, no freight. The cost is brains: who designs it, who executes it, who catches the thing that would have taken your email down on Monday morning. Money buys talent and experience, and talent and experience are what get a project finished on time and within the budget you approved, without a second project to fix the first.

The cheapest quote and the cheapest project are rarely the same document. An engineer who has done sixty tenant-to-tenant migrations costs more per hour than one who has done two, finishes in a fraction of the hours, and leaves far fewer tickets behind. We hire the first kind. That is most of what you're paying for.

We don't have a sales department. The people who handle sales work for us are on salary, and nobody here earns a sales bonus or a commission. Not one dollar of your quote goes to someone for having sold it to you.

We pay extra where it matters instead. Take any implementation project we do, fixed-price or by the hour. Subtract third-party consumables (migration-tool licenses, mostly) and travel, if there is any. Half of what's left is paid out as bonuses to the engineers who did the work. Not to a sales team. To the people in your tenant.

That does two things. It keeps senior engineers here; twenty-year companies don't stay that way with a revolving door. And it gives the people doing your work a direct, personal stake in it going well for everyone involved. On a fixed-price project, the bonus rewards getting it right, not logging more hours.

Yes, that means the other half has to cover everything below. The list is longer than it looks.

• Cloud consumption during the project. Migration tooling licensed per mailbox or per user, temporary compute and storage, test tenants, lab environments, per-device agents. Consumed, billed to us, and gone when the project ends.
• A paid Microsoft support contract, so when something breaks inside Microsoft we escalate inside Microsoft instead of waiting in the public queue with everyone else.
• Microsoft partner program membership (the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, which many still call MPN), with its annual fees and its annual requirements. More on those below.
• Legal counsel and insurance, including cyber insurance that a third party verifies live, the same verification we show clients during onboarding.
• Staffing the response time we publish. Our support SLA is first response within one business hour, and we publish the monthly numbers, including the months we missed. A queue that's answered in an hour is a queue someone is paid to watch.
• Back office. Accounting, billing, compliance, the unglamorous plumbing of a company that intends to still be here in ten years.

Microsoft's Solutions Partner designations aren't bought. They're earned against thresholds Microsoft measures (certified engineers who pass and re-pass exams, performance with customers, customer-success metrics) and they have to be earned again every year. Our direct-bill CSP status is reassessed by Microsoft annually on the same principle.

Every year that costs training time, exam fees, and engineer-hours nobody bills. We think it's worth it, because the designations are how you can check, on Microsoft's site rather than ours, that the people working on your tenant are who we say they are. Our current status, scores included, is in our public register.

This isn't a knock on freelancers. For a twelve-person firm moving a few mailboxes, a good freelancer may be exactly the right choice, and if that's you, we'll say so.

For an organization of 100 to 500 people with customers, auditors, or regulators to answer to, the risk math is different. Here is what a company gives you that one person, however good, cannot:

• A bench. Your engineer gets sick, takes a vacation, or changes jobs. Your migration still happens on the date.
• An escalation path into Microsoft, and the contract that opens it.
• A written fixed price before work begins, and payment after you approve delivery. The overrun risk sits with us.
• Least-privilege access with an audit trail. Granular, time-bound admin rights that you approve, never a standing global admin account in someone's password manager.
• Insurance behind the work.
• No lock-in. You can stop at any time and move your subscriptions to another partner or back to Microsoft; we execute the transfer.
• Someone who answers, at a published response time, with a published record.

Comparing price alone is the fastest way to buy the wrong project. Put any two quotes, ours included, through these seven questions:

1. Is the scope the same? Same number of users, same systems, same cutover plan, same training, same post-go-live support?
2. Who, exactly, does the work, and what happens if that person is unavailable?
3. What happens if it overruns? Who pays?
4. How will they access your tenant, and who approves it?
5. Is the price fixed in writing? When do you pay?
6. Is there insurance behind the work?
7. Can you leave, and what does leaving cost?

If another quote wins on all seven, take it. We'd rather lose a project than win one you'll regret.

Talk to us. Sometimes a phased approach gets you the outcome across two budgets instead of one. Sometimes a narrower scope is the right scope. And sometimes a cheaper route is fine for your situation, and we'll tell you so. We don't sell or implement things that don't make sense for the client, even when they'd pay.

Some quotes get the opposite reaction: that can't be right. Same company, seen from the other side. A project price can be low without anything being cut because of four things:

• Repetition. IT Partner has been delivering Microsoft projects since 2006. The tenth Exchange migration takes a fraction of the time the first one did, and the hundredth a fraction of the tenth, because the unknowns are known.
• Scripts and templates. The repetitive bulk of a migration runs from scripts refined over years. Tenant baselines, Conditional Access policies, Intune configurations and runbooks are written once, reviewed constantly and applied in hours instead of days. A fully scripted Azure Virtual Desktop deployment takes us about fifteen minutes.
• Supervised AI. AI drafts runbooks, writes and checks scripts, reads logs and summarizes a tenant before an engineer touches it. Nothing it produces reaches your tenant until a senior engineer has read it, and every order is closed by a human. Hours that used to be typing and first drafts are mostly not billable anymore, and we pass that on.
• No offices, and a long game. We have been a fully virtual company since COVID, with the team spread across the US and Europe. Microsoft pays us a partner margin on the subscriptions we manage, and clients tend to stay for years, so a project does not have to carry our year; it has to start a relationship worth keeping.

What a low number does not mean: documentation, testing and a rollback plan are in the scope, and what is in and what is out is written on the quote. If our number is lower because our scope is narrower than you assumed, that is the conversation to have before you sign.

Every claim on this page lives in a public facts register, with evidence, a step-by-step check and a plain list of what we can't prove; there's a prompt if you'd rather have your AI assistant run the background check.

Are the Microsoft subscriptions on the quote marked up?

No. Every Microsoft subscription line is at Microsoft's list price, and the quote names the monthly Microsoft price list it was built from; our margin on subscriptions comes from Microsoft, not from a markup on you.

Is the services price fixed?

For project work, yes: quoted in writing before work begins, paid after you approve delivery, so an overrun is our problem rather than yours. Services billed by the hour say so on the quote.

Can we leave later?

Yes. You can stop at any time and move your subscriptions to another partner or back to Microsoft; we execute the transfer, as the transfer page explains.