A five-seat enterprise migration licence costs more than the entire client engagement it's meant to support, for an MSP running one 40-site cleanup a quarter.
That mismatch is the quiet reason so many MSPs still run migrations on a patchwork of PowerShell scripts, manual copy-paste for the small stuff, and a licensed tool only when a project is big enough to justify it. Nobody talks about it in public case studies, because "we did it with PowerShell and a spreadsheet" doesn't make a good testimonial. But it's the reality for a large share of the market that the flagship migration platforms were never really priced for.
The pricing model doesn't match MSP project shapes
ShareGate and its enterprise peers price primarily around ongoing per-user or per-project licensing aimed at large one-off enterprise migrations or steady internal IT teams. An MSP's workload looks different: a burst of ten sites for one client this month, a single site for another client next month, and long stretches with no migration work at all in between. Paying for a subscription that assumes continuous, large-scale usage doesn't fit a business that migrates in bursts across many small clients.
The result is that MSPs either eat the licensing cost and absorb it as overhead, pass it on to the client and lose the deal to a competitor who quotes lower, or find another way to get the migration done.
What "another way" usually looks like
In practice, MSPs without a full enterprise migration licence lean on a combination of approaches, each with real tradeoffs.
- PnP PowerShell scripts. Free, flexible, and genuinely capable of moving content between sites and tenants. The cost is engineering time: writing, testing, and hardening scripts for permission mapping, metadata preservation, and error handling that a commercial tool already solved. Every script also needs updating when Microsoft changes an API, which happens more often than anyone budgets for.
- Manual copy via File Explorer sync or drag-and-drop. Works for a handful of files. Breaks down completely for anything with metadata, versions, or more than a few hundred items, and offers no audit trail for the client who asks "can you prove everything moved?"
- A lighter-weight, per-feature licensed tool. Rather than paying for a full enterprise migration suite, some MSPs use tools priced around the specific job (site copy, cross-tenant clone, permission remediation) rather than a broad platform licence covering capabilities they don't need for a given engagement.
Where the false economy shows up
Free-tool migrations tend to hide their real cost in three places. First, engineering time spent debugging a script against a throttled API is billable hours the MSP doesn't invoice, because "we're still working on the migration" doesn't sell well to a client who was quoted a fixed price. Second, metadata loss discovered after the fact, when a client notices that document author fields or custom column values didn't survive the move, creates rework and reputational cost that dwarfs the licence fee that would have prevented it. Third, permission mapping done manually or with a partial script tends to either over-grant access (a security finding waiting to happen) or under-grant it (a support ticket flood in week one).
None of these costs show up on the invoice for the migration itself. They show up later, as unbilled hours, a difficult client call, or a security remediation project that never should have existed.
What a right-sized approach looks like
The MSPs who've found a sustainable middle path generally do three things. They separate the assessment phase (site inventory, permission audit, storage sizing) from the execution phase, and use lower-cost or free tooling for assessment since that work doesn't need heavy licensing. They reserve paid tooling for the execution phase where metadata fidelity, error handling, and audit trail actually matter to the client outcome. And they price migration engagements around the tool cost per project rather than absorbing an annual licence that assumes a volume of work the MSP doesn't consistently have.
ShareMaster's Clone Master is built around this project shape: licensed per migration capability rather than as a broad enterprise suite, so a single-site or single-client migration doesn't require the same spend as a 200-site enterprise consolidation. The comparison against MigrationWiz covers the cost and feature differences in more detail for teams weighing the tradeoffs directly.
The honest tradeoff
None of this means free tooling is wrong for every job. A one-time, small, low-metadata migration for an internal team with in-house PowerShell skill genuinely doesn't need a licensed platform. The judgment call is recognising when the project has crossed into territory where metadata fidelity, permission accuracy, and audit trail actually matter to the client relationship, and pricing the engagement (and the tooling underneath it) accordingly rather than defaulting to whatever was used last time.