Engineering and records time, which competes with production work. Government charges are published in the fee schedule and are a small part of the total.
Count the hours, not just the fees
Ask the shop supervisor for an honest estimate of the hours needed to retrieve archived records, reconstruct which job first applied a procedure, and write a technical account that a non-specialist reader can follow. In a busy fabrication business those hours are genuinely expensive because they come out of production. Government filing charges should be confirmed against the current fee schedule when the petition is prepared, with premium processing as a separate decision, and they will be modest by comparison. Budget also for a professional review that tests the claim against the legal standard before filing, since a weak case is far cheaper to discover at that point than after the effort has been spent.
The cost plan should put preservation of evidence ahead of travel and relocation. A records vendor’s quote resolves the cost of recovering archived technical files; the government fee schedule resolves the filing amount; a travel quote only estimates a later consequence. The decision is whether the company has enough proof to justify spending on the move. Avoid treating a costly technical exhibit as useful if it does not address the distinction between proprietary knowledge and ordinary experience. Hypothetical example: an industrial-refrigeration firm pays to retrieve version-controlled engineering files before it books the specialist’s flights, because the files decide whether the assignment is supportable.