Most firms on Thomson Reuters Virtual Office CS pay $147 per portal, per month. The same Thomson Reuters applications run $89.99 per user, per month at OneUp Networks — with storage, support, and migration included instead of billed separately. For a 10-person firm, that’s about $25,080 a year today versus $10,799, a difference of roughly $14,000.
Plans with OneUp Networks start at $49.99 per user for firms running a single Thomson Reuters application. Your own number depends on three things: how many users you have, which Virtual Office option you’re on, and how much data you store. The calculator below works it out in about a minute.
In this article:
- The side-by-side numbers for a 10-user firm, line by line
- A calculator you can run with your own user count and rate
- Where the extra cost actually comes from — storage is usually the culprit
- What you keep, and what changes, when you move
- When staying on Virtual Office CS is still the right decision
The comparison, in one table for 10-user firm
Ten users, the full CS Professional Suite, 100 GB of firm data, one annual support contract. This is the most common shape of firm we move, so it’s the one to start with.
| Cost line, per year | Virtual Office CS | OneUp Networks (Complete Suite) |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting subscription | $17,640 | $10,799 |
| Storage above allowance (60 GB) | $6,480 | Included — 500 GB |
| Technical support | $960 | Included |
| Migration and setup | $905 one-time | Free |
| Total, per year | $25,080 | $10,799 |
Difference: about $14,281 a year, or 57%.
Change the inputs and the answer changes. A three-person firm running only UltraTax CS with almost no stored data compares $147 against $49.99 — a 66% gap on the subscription line alone. A firm that has been diligent about archiving and stays inside its 40 GB pool sees about 42% instead of 57%. Storage is usually what separates those two outcomes.
Where that extra cost comes from
The $147 is the headline. Three other lines sit underneath it, and together they explain most of the gap.
What Virtual Office CS costs
Thomson Reuters publishes Virtual Office CS pricing in its CS Professional Suite price list. There are three options, and firms pick one:
| Virtual Office CS option | Published rate |
|---|---|
| CS Professional Suite applications only | $147 per portal, per month |
| Microsoft Office without CS Professional Suite | $154 per portal, per month |
| CS Professional Suite applications and Microsoft Office | $179 per portal, per month |
Two things worth flagging before you do any math:
Software licenses are separate. The price list notes that standard license fees still apply to the products themselves. Your UltraTax CS, Practice CS, and Fixed Assets CS licenses are billed on top of the hosting fee. That’s true wherever you host — so when you compare Virtual Office CS to a third-party host, you’re comparing hosting to hosting, not software to software.
Microsoft Office has changed. Thomson Reuters’ current documentation states that Virtual Office CS users need the firm’s own Microsoft 365 tenant and individual M365 accounts to run Outlook, Excel, Word, and the rest. If your invoice still reflects a bundled Office option, that’s worth a call with your account representative before renewal.
The four costs that aren’t in the per-portal price
This is where most firms find the surprise. The per-portal rate is the headline; these are the lines underneath it.
1. Storage above 4 GB per portal — $9 per GB, per month
Each NetStaff CS portal with Virtual Office CS access is allocated 4 GB. Portals without Virtual Office access get 500 MB. Space is pooled across the firm, and anything above the pool is billed at $9 per GB, per month.
That number is easy to skim past. It isn’t small. A ten-person firm has a 40 GB pool. If the firm actually stores 100 GB — a modest figure once FileCabinet CS has a few tax seasons in it — the overage is 60 GB, or $540 a month, $6,480 a year. At 250 GB stored, the overage alone passes $22,000 a year.
There’s a legitimate way to soften this: Virtual Office CS Archive Storage holds older, rarely-touched documents at $19 per 10 GB per month instead of $9 per GB. If nobody at your firm has done an archiving pass in a few years, that’s worth doing regardless of who hosts you.
2. Technical support contract — $960 per year and up
Annual support contracts run $960 for the first product and $540 for each additional product. Month-to-month is $80 and $45. Off-contract help is billed hourly at $180, in $30 ten-minute increments.
For a firm running UltraTax CS, Practice CS, and Fixed Assets CS on an annual contract, that’s $2,040 a year in support before anyone picks up the phone.
3. NetFirm CS setup — $905, one time
NetFirm CS is required to administer NetStaff CS and NetClient CS portals, including Virtual Office CS. Setup is $905, one time. You’ve probably already paid it — but it belongs in the picture if you’re modeling a first-year cost.
4. Microsoft 365 licensing
If Office runs inside the hosted environment, the M365 subscriptions come from your firm’s own tenant. Budget it as its own line, not as part of hosting.
What OneUp Networks charges
Four published plans for Thomson Reuters hosting pricing, all per user, per month, all with migration and 24/7 support included:
| Plan | Applications | RAM | Storage | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | Any 1 Thomson Reuters app (Ex- UltraTax CS Hosting) | 2 GB/user | 10 GB NVMe/user | $49.99 |
| Advanced | Any 3 Thomson Reuters apps | 3 GB/user | 20 GB NVMe/user | $69.99 |
| Complete Suite | The entire TR Suite | 6 GB/user | 50 GB NVMe/user | $89.99 |
| Total Practice | TR Suite + QuickBooks, Drake, or any other app | Unlimited | 100 GB NVMe/user | $109.99 |
Every plan includes free setup and migration, 24/7 human support, daily backups with 120-day retention, and the ability to scale users up for busy season and back down after.
The storage line is the one to sit with. Complete CS Professional Suite hosting gives a ten-person firm 500 GB of NVMe storage inside the subscription. The same firm on Virtual Office CS has 40 GB before the meter starts.
Three Different Firm Profiles
| Firm | Today on Virtual Office CS | On OneUp Networks | Annual difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo/small — 3 users, UltraTax CS only, 20 GB | $6,156 | $1,800 (Essential) | ~$4,356 (71%) |
| Growing — 10 users, full suite, 100 GB | $25,080 | $10,799 (Complete Suite) | ~$14,281 (57%) |
| Multi-app — 25 users, suite + QuickBooks, 300 GB | $67,200* | $32,997 (Total Practice) | ~$34,203 (51%) |
*25 users at $147 ($44,100), plus 200 GB of storage overage ($21,600), plus a two-product support contract ($1,500). QuickBooks isn’t hosted in Virtual Office CS at all, so a firm in that third row is usually paying a separate provider for it on top — which is why consolidating onto one server tends to save more than the table shows.
Rather than pick one scenario and call it typical, run yours:
Thomson Reuters hosting cost check
Compare what you pay for Virtual Office CS with what you’d pay at OneUp Networks
Enter your user count and your current per-portal rate. The math updates as you type — no email required.
Your current setup
Your OneUp Networks plan
Your estimated numbers
You could keep about
$14,281
per year
57% lower than todayThe gap is your savings — about $1,190 back every month.
| Cost line | Virtual Office CS | OneUp Networks |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting subscription | $17,640 | $10,799 |
| Storage above the included allowance | $6,480 | Included |
| Technical support | $960 | Included |
| Migration & setup | $905 one-time | Free |
| Total per year | $25,080 | $10,799 |
Over three years, that difference adds up to about $42,844.
In every OneUp plan
- Free migration and setup
- Daily backups, 120-day retention
- 24/7 human support
- Scale users up for busy season, down after
Why the gap exists
The difference isn’t a discount or an introductory rate. It comes from three structural things.
Storage is priced differently. Metered per-GB storage made sense when everything was billed by the gigabyte. NVMe capacity is now cheap enough to include generously in the subscription, which is why OneUp Networks bundles 10–100 GB per user instead of 4 GB.
Support isn’t a separate SKU. Support is part of the plan, not a $960 annual contract with hourly overage. When something breaks at 9 p.m. on April 12, the question is how fast someone answers, not whether you’re covered.
One environment holds everything. Virtual Office CS runs CS Professional Suite. QuickBooks, Drake, Sage, and the add-ins your team relies on live somewhere else — usually a second host with a second invoice. The Total Practice Plan puts the whole stack on one dedicated environment, which removes the second bill and the file-shuffling between systems.
What you keep when you move to OneUp networks
Price only matters if the environment holds up in March. Here’s what comes with a OneUp Networks environment, the best alternative to Virtual Office CS:
- Hardware built for tax software. Local NVMe SSD storage, DDR5 RAM, 3 GHz+ processors on AMD 9000-series or Intel 4th- eneration and above. UltraTax CS and SQL-backed applications are sensitive to storage latency and single-thread speed, which is exactly what this hardware profile targets.
- Backups in three places. One onsite, two offsite, with 120-day rolling retention aligned to Veeam’s recommendations. At any moment there are five running copies of your data: the primary site, the DR site, and three backup copies. It includes the disaster recovery plan.
- Security built for client financial data. Therefore equipped with private dedicated servers, physical and software firewalls, enterprise endpoint detection and response, multi-factor authentication, encryption in transit, IDS/IPS, DDoS mitigation, role-based access, and network segmentation. Data centers are Tier 3 and Tier 4 facilities with 2N/2N+1 power and cooling, biometric access, and support for SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and FISMA. Our practices follow IRS cybersecurity guidelines for handling taxpayer data.
- Help with Thomson Reuters, not just with the server. When an issue is on the application side, our team can call or chat with Thomson Reuters support on your behalf. That’s usually the difference between a resolved ticket and an afternoon your administrator spends on hold.
- Your own licenses, hosted. OneUp Networks does not sell Thomson Reuters licenses. You keep the licenses your firm already owns and purchases directly from Thomson Reuters; we host those applications, such as, Accounting CS Hosting, Practice CS Hosting, Planner CS Hosting and Fixed Assets CS hosting.
How the move actually works
Firms worry that migration means a lost week. The process is structured to prevent that, and most firms schedule it between May and December rather than during filing season.
| Phase | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 0 — Paperwork | NDA, contract, documentation |
| 1 — Discovery | Capture sheet, review of your current environment, users, applications, workflows |
| 2 — Preparation | Final architecture, migration plan, setup planning |
| 3 — Setup | Cluster server build, application installation, data migration |
| 4 — Go-live | User setup, onboarding, training, launch |
| 5 — Hypercare | Post-launch support, issue resolution, stabilization |
Migration and setup are included in the plan price. The cutover is planned so your team logs off one environment and logs into the next, with almost no downtime in between. Check how one firm moved off Virtual Office CS to OneUp Networks.
When Virtual Office CS is still the right call
It isn’t always the wrong choice, and it’s worth being straight about that.
Stay where you are if you’re mid-term on a multi-year Thomson Reuters agreement with an early-termination cost that outweighs a year of savings. Also, if your firm runs nothing but CS Professional Suite, stores very little data, and has never seen a storage overage on an invoice — at that point the gap narrows considerably. Stay if you’re two weeks from a filing deadline; move in the off-season instead.
Look seriously at moving if any of these are true: your storage overage line has grown year over year, you run QuickBooks or Drake or Sage alongside the CS suite, your team feels the environment slow down in March, or you’re paying separately for support you assumed was included.
Frequently Asked Questions
The published rate is $147 per portal per month for CS Professional Suite applications, $154 for Microsoft Office without the suite, and $179 for both. Software licenses, storage above 4 GB per portal, and technical support contracts are billed separately.
The cost most firms feel is the stack, not one line. There’s the UltraTax CS license, the Virtual Office CS hosting fee if you’re in the cloud, per-GB storage above the included allowance, and an annual support contract. Hosting is the piece you can change without changing software — which is why firms usually look there first.
Yes. Firms that own valid Thomson Reuters licenses can run those applications in a private cloud environment operated by a third-party host. You continue to buy and renew licenses directly from Thomson Reuters; the host provides the infrastructure, security, backups, and support for UltraTax CS hosting
Yes. Data files, application configuration, printer setups, and user profiles are migrated as part of the setup phase, then verified with your team before go-live.
Yes. Plans scale up and down by user, so a firm that runs 12 people year-round and 20 in March pays for what it uses.
Yes, on the Total Practice Plan. It’s built for firms running the Thomson Reuters suite alongside QuickBooks, Drake, Sage, or other applications in one hosted environment. You can read the case study where a client moved all apps on the unified server
See your own numbers
Pull your last Thomson Reuters invoice, run it through the calculator above, and you’ll know in two minutes whether this is worth a conversation. If it is, we’ll put together a written side-by-side using your actual user count, applications, and data volume — not an estimate.
Prefer to see it first? Start a free trial and test your applications in a live environment before you decide.
OneUp Networks is an independent cloud hosting provider. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Thomson Reuters or any of its subsidiaries. UltraTax CS®, Practice CS®, FileCabinet CS®, Fixed Assets CS®, Virtual Office CS®, NetStaff CS®, and NetFirm CS® are trademarks of their respective owners. Our services support firms that already own valid licenses of Thomson Reuters software. Pricing shown for Thomson Reuters products is taken from the published CS Professional Suite price list and is subject to change — confirm current rates with your Thomson Reuters account representative.
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