We pay about five thousand dollars a year for ShareGate.
It is a SharePoint tool. If you have never had to move a company's files into Microsoft 365, you have been spared a specific kind of week. ShareGate makes that week survivable. It copies old file shares into SharePoint and keeps the folder dates intact. It tells you who outside the company can see what. The support is genuinely good. I have no real complaint about the product, and I want to say that plainly before I say the rest.
Here is the rest. I wanted to wire it into how I actually work now, which is with an AI sitting next to me doing the boring parts. So I went looking for the piece that lets an assistant drive it. That piece was not in what we had paid for. It sat behind more licensing and another conversation with sales.
I sat with that for about a minute. Five grand a year already, and the one modern thing I wanted was a fresh line item. Then the thought that has been getting louder all year turned up again. This is just scripts behind a nice window.
Strip the logo off most expensive software and you find a few hundred lines someone decided to charge rent on.
Because it is. Under the GUI, the real work is a script talking to the same SharePoint APIs anyone can call. The hard part was never the code. It was knowing which calls to make, and wrapping it so a tired admin could click one button. That wrapping used to be the moat. It is not anymore.
So I said screw it, and I built our own. A couple of evenings later there was a real thing: a window with the same tabs and a calm dark theme that does not cook your eyes at midnight, with a PowerShell engine under it doing the actual work. The piece I had gone looking for in the first place, the one an AI can drive, was sitting right there in the box, because that was the entire point. It is free. The licence is MIT. You download it, double-click, and it sets itself up.
What did that cost me? A bit of my time, and not much of it. The compute to generate the thing rounds to zero. That is the part I keep turning over in my head. The price of building this kind of software has fallen through the floor, and almost nobody has updated their mental model for what that does to everything sitting on top of it.
Here is what I think it does. The expensive-and-simple stuff gets rebuilt and given away. Not the genuinely hard things, the deep platforms with real network effects underneath them. But a tool that is mostly a clever wrapper around an API someone else runs is a sitting duck now. One annoyed person with a free afternoon can rebuild the useful part from scratch and never think about it again.
I did not invent this idea. I am following OpenBB's lead. They looked at the Bloomberg Terminal, more than twenty thousand a year and the most entrenched tool in all of finance, and they built an open version anyone can run. Plenty of people said it could never matter. It has tens of thousands of stars now and a real company behind it. That lesson stuck. If they can do it to Bloomberg, I can do it to a SharePoint utility on a Tuesday.
None of this is a shot at ShareGate. They built something good and earned their money for years, and I would still point a busy team at them for the polish and the support line. I just do not think that feature is behind another licence is a sentence that holds for very much longer. Not for them. Not for most of the people saying it.
The thing is called OpenGateSP. It went up on GitHub tonight. My own copy is open on the second monitor as I write this, dark theme, the same warm-and-cold colours I put on everything now, waiting for the next file share nobody wants to move by hand.
— Sameer