Late-stage buyers usually feel confident about the sticker price of a UC (Unified Communications) compliance tool.
“The surprise comes later, when invoices and internal effort reveal the real UC compliance costs.”
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Whether that is ingestion charges, storage growth, search and export overhead, and the “one-time” migration work that never quite behaves like a one-time event.
If you are close to signing, this guide breaks down the total cost of ownership (TCO) in plain terms.
1) Ingestion Fees and Capture Complexity
Many UC compliance platforms price by user, by data volume, or by the number of channels captured.
The trap is not taking into account the full scope of collaboration applications running across the enterprise. IDC research notes companies often have almost seven different collaborative applications in play. More tools usually means more connectors, more policies, and more data streams to ingest.
What to budget for:
- Per-channel capture costs (Teams, Zoom, Webex, Slack, plus voice/recording sources)
- Connector set-up effort (testing, permissions, service accounts)
- Ongoing connector maintenance as APIs change or tenants evolve
Buyer tip: ask vendors to price your environment as it exists, not as you hope it will be in 12 months.
2) Storage Growth and Retrieval Charges
Most teams budget for storage as a flat line. UC data does not behave that way. Video, transcripts, rich media, and file sharing drive compounding growth, especially if retention periods are long.
Even if your vendor bundles storage, the economics still matter because someone pays for it eventually, either through tiered pricing, overages, or a higher renewal quote.
If you manage storage in your own cloud, remember that “archive tier” storage can have lower storage cost but higher retrieval and rehydration costs when you need the data back online.
What to budget for:
- Annual storage growth rate (best estimated from current message volume and meeting recording usage)
- Retrieval costs for investigations, disputes, or security incidents
- Indexing costs (some platforms price based on how much content is indexed for fast search)
Buyer tip: model at least two scenarios, normal operations and “incident year,” where retrieval and export volume spikes.
3) Licensing Add-ons and Pay-as-You-Go Charges
A major source of hidden UC compliance costs is the failure to recognize the costly ‘extras’. Specific discovery, audit, or data governance capabilities often live in add-ons or premium tiers.
Microsoft’s Purview eDiscovery billing documentation spells out that some features can involve pay-as-you-go billing. This includes data storage for non-Microsoft 365 enterprise data.
What to budget for:
- Premium feature licensing (advanced discovery, advanced audit, advanced governance)
- API usage charges where applicable
- Incremental storage tied to discovery cases or imported external data
Buyer tip: request a licensing “bill of materials” that shows what is included, what is optional, and what triggers usage-based charges.
4) Admin Effort and Operational Overhead
A UC compliance tool is not a fire-and-forget service. Admin time is one of the most underestimated budget lines because it is spread across teams: security, UC engineering, compliance operations, and IT support.
Typical cost drivers:
- Policy tuning (reducing false positives and exceptions)
- User lifecycle and guest access management
- Integration maintenance (identity provider, SIEM logging, ticketing)
- Reporting and stakeholder reviews
A Forrester Consulting TEI study commissioned by Smarsh reported that with a new compliance platform, the productivity of enterprise compliance staff increased by 60%. Over three years, this would provide a value of $3.6 million and saved over 27,000 hours of labor per year.
This demonstrates a real-life case of where smart tech adoption can reduce admin effort – and improve business success in the long run.
Buyer tip: budget named owners and weekly hours. If ownership is unclear, you should treat that as a cost and a risk.
5) Migration and Legacy Retirement Costs
Migration is where timelines slip and professional services bills grow. The common reasons for this are:
- Mapping retention rules and labels from old systems to new
- Exporting and rehydrating legacy archives
- Normalizing content from multiple sources (email, chat, meetings, files)
- Validating search accuracy and access controls
Also consider the “exit cost” in reverse. If you ever need to switch vendors, can you export data in usable formats, at speed, without huge fees?
Buyer tip: insist on a written migration plan with assumptions, dependencies, and what constitutes “done.”
What Next
The best way to avoid surprise UC compliance costs is to stop budgeting as if this is a single product purchase. It is a living data pipeline.
Capture expands as tools expand. Storage grows as behavior shifts toward richer media. Admin effort rises as you tune policy and integrations. Migration is real work, not just a line item.
If you model costs across ingestion, storage, licensing, operations, and migration, you will not only budget more accurately, you will negotiate better.
To find out more about how Security, Compliance, and Risk are shaping the future of UC innovation, explore our free guide on the topic.
