After handoff
What it costs to keep running after handoff.
The setup fee is a single payment. Below are the recurring charges each vendor bills you directly, in your own accounts, on your own card. SpecialAIzed Flow does not resell them, mark them up, or take a commission on any of them.
| Vendor charge | Basis | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Business Premium | 3 named users × CAD $29.80 | CAD $89.40 |
| Teams Phone, pay-as-you-go calling (zone 1) | One named telephone user, on the same suite as email. Calls are metered. | CAD $16.30 |
| Bitwarden Teams | 3 named users × USD $4. Or bring your own. | USD $12 |
| Afi SaaS Backup | Annual billing, five-user commercial minimum. Monthly equivalent of USD $180 per year. | USD $15 |
| Estimated monthly total | CAD $105.70USD $27 | |
Two currencies, shown separately on purpose. The CAD and USD charges are billed by different vendors, and the USD lines convert at whatever rate your card issuer applies on the day. Adding a made-up exchange rate here would make the total look more precise than it is.
The cheaper suite, and what it costs you
A less expensive tier exists. It is not the one this package is built on.
The same configuration on Microsoft 365 Business Basic comes to CAD $44.80 plus USD $27 per month. That is a real saving and you are entitled to choose it.
What the cheaper tier removes from the delivered scope:
- Intune device management, so the endpoint baseline for your devices cannot be built or evidenced
- Microsoft Defender for Business, so there is no managed endpoint protection to point at
- The Conditional Access baseline that the least-privilege and break-glass work depends on
Those are not incidental features. They are the controls the device baseline, the recovery evidence, and roughly a third of the evidence pack are built on. On the cheaper tier, email, identity, files, the phone, passwords, and backup are still established properly — but the security evidence you would hand an insurer or a customer is substantially thinner, and the acceptance baseline changes to match. That is a different engagement, priced separately, and stated here rather than discovered halfway through delivery.
The password manager is your call
A default is assumed. You are not bound to it.
Bitwarden Teams is what the estimate assumes, because it is inexpensive, it does credential sharing and recovery custody properly, and it hands over cleanly. The Enterprise tier costs more and this setup does not require it.
If you already use 1Password, Keeper, Dashlane, or anything else that supports named users and recovery, the foundation is built around it instead and the line above becomes whatever you already pay. For one or two people, a free tier may genuinely be enough.
Self-hosting is possible — Vaultwarden is free to license and runs well. It is not recommended here. Somebody has to patch that server, watch it, and recover it, and that somebody is either a three-person team or an indefinite dependency on SpecialAIzed Flow, which defeats the point of handing over a system you own outright. Self-hosted secrets that nobody maintains are a liability, not a saving.
One rule worth knowing before you choose
The phone has to live with the email.
The business number is provisioned inside whichever suite you pick, on the same tenant and the same named user as the mailbox. Microsoft email means Teams Phone. Google email means Google Voice. There is no mixing a Google mailbox with a Microsoft number, and choosing the suite is therefore also choosing the phone platform.
The estimate uses the cheapest calling option on each side. On Microsoft that is pay-as-you-go, where you get the number and the phone system and pay per minute rather than for an included bundle. If you turn out to be on calls all day, the fixed domestic-calling plan costs more per month and less per call, and we can switch you after you have a month of real usage rather than guessing now.
That is a deliberate constraint, not an implementation limitation. A number attached to the same identity, directory, and recovery path as the mailbox is one thing to administer and one thing to hand over. Splitting them doubles the vendor relationships and the failure modes for no benefit at this size.
What this estimate does not include
The honest edges of the number above.
- Tax. No GST, PST, or HST is applied above. Your rate depends on your province and registration status.
- Currency conversion. USD lines are billed in USD. Your card issuer sets the rate and may add a foreign-transaction fee.
- Your domain. You buy and own it directly, typically a small annual charge from your registrar.
- AI usage. The package sets up one client-owned AI account with spending protections. What it then costs depends entirely on how much you use it, so no figure here would mean anything.
- Calling beyond the included plan, hardware, repairs, additional users or devices, and anything added after handoff.
- The backup floor. Afi enforces a five-user commercial minimum, so a one- or two-person business still pays the floor rather than a per-user amount. Cheaper per-user backup products exist. Alternatives are priced with you at scoping rather than named here without being tested against your data — the test that matters is whether it restores, not what it costs. The backup rate above is also the one figure on this page not re-confirmed on the vendor’s own page in the last week.
- Private access is usually nothing. Tailscale only appears when you have a private resource or administrator path that needs it, and most teams this size do not. Its free tier is not an option for you: it is explicitly non-commercial, and any network on a business domain — which yours will be — is treated as commercial use.
- Private access is only charged when you actually have a private resource or administrator path that needs it. Most three-person businesses do not.
Rates were checked against each vendor’s public pricing on 6 August 2026. Vendors change prices. Nothing here is a quote, and every figure is re-checked with you and approved before anything is purchased in your name.