The employer's filing charge and optional premium processing from the USCIS fee schedule, plus considerable internal technical time preparing and redacting evidence.
Senior technical staff time is the real budget line
The government charges are published and predictable. The substantial cost is the work of turning a specialist's institutional knowledge into a documented case, and it falls on the people least able to spare the time: the quality manager, the specialist and the person who controls the document system. They must locate validated files, confirm authorship, obtain approval to disclose customer-related material, prepare redactions, and write the analysis distinguishing company knowledge from published standards.
Requests for further evidence are common in this category because the standard invites scrutiny, so budget for a second round of professional and internal work. Premium processing accelerates adjudication only. Where a case is being built largely on indispensability rather than on distinctive knowledge, the cheapest step is an honest early assessment, because that is the case most likely to consume the budget and fail.