Pricing and payment

This article explains what a VaultMe migration costs, how that figure is worked out, and how paying for one works in practice.

How is VaultMe priced?

VaultMe is priced per batch and per migrated user account. You pay for the user accounts you actually migrate, in the batch that migrates them, and that is the whole commercial relationship: there is no VaultMe license to buy, no subscription to keep up, no prepaid bundle of migrations to draw down, and no standing per-seat fee for accounts sitting in your environment. All prices are in US dollars.

A batch is the set of migrations that run together from one migration project — one migration per user account, from a source account to the destination account it is mapped to. The price of a batch is simply the sum of the prices of the user accounts in it. There is no batch-level charge layered on top, so a batch of forty user accounts costs what those forty accounts cost, and nothing more. Where the batch sits in the wider sequence of a project is described in "How VaultMe works".

Shared drives, shared mailboxes, and other resource types can be part of a migration as well. They do not introduce a second kind of charge, because they are migrated through user accounts, so the pricing unit stays the user account either way. How each kind lands on the bill is covered in "How are non-user-account resources priced?".

Each batch is billed and paid on its own. You create a batch, pay for it, and run it; if you create another batch later, you pay for that one when its turn comes. Nothing carries over between batches — there is no balance to top up and no credit left behind by an earlier run.

What does a migrated user account cost?

Every migrated user account is priced individually, from three components:

1. Base migration fee — $59.99 for each migrated user account, the same regardless of how much that account holds.
2. Data fee by volume — $0.20 per gigabyte of migrated content.
3. Data fee by item count — $0.20 per 1,000 migrated items.

An item is a single piece of content: one email message, one file, one calendar event, one contact. VaultMe migrates content item by item and counts it the same way, so the item count reflects how many separate things an account holds rather than how large they are. Volume and item count are charged separately because they do not move together — an account holding a few very large video files and an account holding a hundred thousand short messages can occupy similar storage while representing very different amounts of work.

Because each user account is priced from its own volume and item count, a small account and a large one in the same batch cost different amounts. Take a batch of three user accounts:

1. A 3 GB account holding 8,000 items — $59.99 base, plus $0.60 for volume and $1.60 for items, for a total of $62.19.
2. A 12 GB account holding 60,000 items — $59.99 base, plus $2.40 and $12.00, for a total of $74.39.
3. A 40 GB account holding 250,000 items — $59.99 base, plus $8.00 and $50.00, for a total of $117.99.

The price of that batch is the sum of the three: $254.57.

The example also shows which number tends to move the total. In the largest of the three user accounts, 40 GB of content contributes $8.00 while its 250,000 items contribute $50.00. Item counts usually matter more than gigabytes, which is worth knowing before you try to predict a bill from storage figures alone.

How is the final price determined?

An exact price cannot be quoted from the account list alone. Two user accounts that look identical in a directory export can differ by an order of magnitude in item count, and neither the volume nor the item count of an account is visible until VaultMe has looked inside it. Only the base migration fee is knowable in advance; the data fees are not.

That is why final prices are calculated after the user accounts are connected and scanned. The pre-migration scan measures each connected account, and the figures it produces are what the price is built from. The scan is described in "How VaultMe works".

Everything up to that point is free. VaultMe does not ask for a payment method at signup, so you can create a migration project, connect both sides, run the scan, and read the results without entering card details anywhere. Scans can also be re-run as the project changes, at no cost each time.

The consequence is that the amount at checkout is the price of the batch as configured, calculated from measured content rather than estimated from a rough account count. If those numbers are not what you expected, the project is still yours to change or abandon: you can adjust the scope and re-scan, or stop entirely. Nothing obliges you to continue, and the access you granted VaultMe can be revoked from the provider's administration console whenever you decide you are done.

How are non-user-account resources priced?

The user account is the only unit VaultMe prices. Nothing else a migration carries is a pricing unit in its own right, and what each kind adds to the bill depends on how it reaches the destination.

In an Outlook to Google Workspace migration, there is nothing of this kind to price. VaultMe migrates user accounts, and the content of each one arrives through the account itself, so the per-user-account price already covers the whole migration.

Are different content types billed together or separately?

A migration can carry email, files, calendars, and contacts, and it normally carries every type in scope in one run. When the content types you selected migrate together in the same batch, they are priced together under the rules above: one base migration fee for each user account, and one pair of data fees per account covering the combined volume and item count of every type included. Adding calendars and contacts to a migration that already moves email and files adds their volume and items, not another base fee.

Splitting the content types of the same user accounts across separate batches changes that, because each batch is billed and paid separately and each one charges its own base migration fee for every account in it. Migrating email now and files later means each of those accounts pays $59.99 twice. For ten user accounts that is $599.90 of additional cost, and the data fees are no lower for it — the same gigabytes and the same items are still migrated, just spread over two runs.

Splitting the user accounts across batches is a different thing and costs nothing extra: each account is migrated once and billed once, whichever batch it lands in. A phased rollout that moves twenty accounts this week and twenty next week costs exactly what one batch of forty would, so the strategy discussed in "Choosing a migration strategy" is free to follow the shape of the project rather than the shape of the bill. It is only splitting a single account's content across batches that repeats the base fee.

For that reason, migrate all the content types you have selected for a user account in one batch. Beyond the duplicated fees, running the same accounts twice means preparing, scanning, paying for, monitoring, and reporting on two batches instead of one, and end users live with a partially migrated destination in between. Deciding which content types are in scope in the first place is covered in "Selecting content for migration".

Are sync-up (delta) migrations charged separately?

A sync-up migration (delta migration) is a follow-up run that copies what changed in the source since the previous run. Some change is unavoidable: mail keeps arriving and files keep being edited while a batch is in progress, and those changes are not in the initial copy. VaultMe runs a sync-up automatically once the initial run finishes, and additional sync-ups can be run afterward for accounts that are not currently processing. This behavior is described in "How VaultMe works".

Sync-ups are not billed as separate paid runs. They are included with the batch that was already paid for, so there is no second checkout, no second invoice, and no per-account fee for a follow-up pass. A batch is not really complete until the changes made while it ran have caught up, so the sync-up that delivers them is part of what the batch price already covers.

That inclusion assumes a sync-up of reasonable size, which is what a normal gap between the initial run and cutover produces. If the volume of change on a source account turns out to be unusually large and goes well beyond what a sync-up is meant to cover, support may cancel that sync-up rather than let it run as an unbounded second migration.

Which payment methods are accepted?

VaultMe accepts major credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo. All payments are processed in US dollars.

Several methods that organizations often expect are not supported: invoice-based payment terms, bank transfers, purchase orders, and checks. If your procurement process normally issues a purchase order and settles an invoice weeks later, it is worth raising early, because a batch cannot start until its payment has completed. The invoice VaultMe produces documents a payment that has already gone through rather than requesting one, as described in "How do invoices work?".

When does payment need to happen?

Payment comes late, and deliberately so. No payment method is required at signup, and the entire setup phase runs without one:

• Signing up and creating a project — VaultMe asks for no card details to get started.
• Connecting the source and the destination — connections are established, and access can be revoked again, without payment.
• Running pre-migration scans — scans are free and can be re-run as often as the project needs, which is what makes them usable as a working tool rather than a final step.

Payment is required only when you decide to start a paid batch. It gates the run itself, not the configuration around it, so everything you do to prepare a batch — including finding out what it will cost and what still needs fixing — happens before any money is involved. Where this sits in the overall sequence is laid out in "How VaultMe works", and the wider question of what genuinely has to be settled before a migration is covered in "Before you migrate".

Paying does not itself start the migration. Checkout creates a paid batch and leaves it waiting; you start it when you are ready, which is what lets a run be scheduled for a weekend or an evening rather than launching the moment the payment clears. An invoice is issued once checkout completes.

What happens if a payment does not go through?

Most declined payments come from the card side rather than from VaultMe, and they fall into a few recognizable patterns:

• Card verification mismatch — the billing details entered at checkout do not match what the card issuer holds on file, and the issuer rejects the charge on that basis. Re-entering the billing address exactly as the bank has it usually resolves this.
• An unsupported confirmation step — some banks require an extra 3D Secure confirmation, such as a one-time code or a prompt in a banking app. If that step cannot complete, the payment does not go through even though the card is otherwise fine.
• A bank-side decline — the issuer refuses the charge and does not disclose why. VaultMe sees only that the payment was declined and cannot override that decision.

Support can help by confirming whether VaultMe saw the attempt at all and by sharing whatever context is available about it, which is often enough to tell a checkout problem apart from a bank decision. What support cannot do is overrule a bank or a payment provider's own rules, so for a bank-side decline the fastest route is for the cardholder to contact their bank directly and ask about the specific attempt.

When you write to support@vaultme.com about a payment, include the approximate time of the attempt and the last four digits of the card used. Those two details are what make it possible to find the attempt and tell you what happened to it.

How do invoices work?

Each batch gets its own invoice, and that invoice covers every user account in the batch. A project run as several batches produces several invoices, one per batch, which also means the accounting follows the same boundaries as the migration itself.

Invoices are downloaded from the batch page in VaultMe once checkout is complete. Before downloading, you can add invoice details such as the company name and address the invoice should be made out to. This is not a one-time step at checkout — the details can be filled in whenever you download, so an invoice can be re-downloaded later with corrected or added information if accounting asks for it.

For anything the invoice itself does not settle — a document your finance team needs in a particular form, a question about what a line covers, or a correction after the fact — write to support@vaultme.com.

Can a migration be cancelled, and is the payment refundable?

Refund eligibility turns on one question: has the batch been started? Paying for a batch does not start it, so a batch that has been paid for but not yet launched is still in the before-start state, with all the flexibility that implies.

• Before the batch is started — cancelling is eligible for a full refund. Nothing has been processed and no provider access has been consumed, so there is nothing to have used up.
• After the batch is started — only partial refunds may apply, because the processing and access costs of the work already done have been incurred and cannot be reversed. What that means in a specific case is something support works out with you.

Some situations look like grounds for a refund but are not. Delays caused by conditions outside VaultMe's control are the common example, and provider throttling is the usual form it takes: source and destination providers cap how fast their systems will accept migration traffic, VaultMe cannot bypass those caps, and a migration that runs slower because of them is still running correctly. What actually drives migration timelines is covered in "What determines migration duration".

Where something genuinely went wrong on VaultMe's side, the case is looked at on its own merits. Support reviews verified technical issues and applies the refund policy to what it finds, rather than either refusing on principle or promising an outcome in advance. To start that review, write to support@vaultme.com with the batch in question and a description of what happened.

Are there special arrangements for partners and repeat migrations?

Managed service providers and IT consultants who run migrations for clients are in a different position from an organization migrating itself once. VaultMe has a partner arrangement for that pattern, which depending on the case can include special pricing and a dedicated support contact for the migrations you run on your clients' behalf.

What a partner arrangement does not do is change the shape of the model. There is still no subscription and no prepaid bundle of migrations to buy: every client migration is a batch, priced per migrated user account and paid for when that batch is ready to run, exactly as described above.

Partner arrangements are not set up in the app. Write to support@vaultme.com describing the kind and volume of migrations you expect to run, and the terms are worked out directly.