The petition is the employer's filing, so the government fee and the preparation of the corporate and knowledge evidence sit with the company. The largest cost is usually not a fee at all but the professional and internal time spent creating a documentary record the business never previously needed.
Paying to write down what was only ever taught
Budgets for these petitions are built around the published fee schedule, and then the actual invoice is dominated by something else. An L-1B claim requires proof of what an employee knows and how the organisation came to hold that knowledge, and small employers frequently have none of it in usable form. Hypothetical example: a rural installer near Saint-Joachim-de-Shefford discovers its commissioning method exists as a shared spreadsheet, a set of photographs on a foreman's phone and fifteen years of habit, and producing an evidentiary record takes six weeks of engineering time nobody costed.
That time is real money and it should appear in the budget beside the filing fee. Two other line items get missed. Translation of French-language internal records into English is a per-page cost that scales with how much is submitted, which is a reason to select evidence rather than send everything.
And a request for further evidence, which is common in this category, is a second round of the same work; assuming it may happen produces a more honest number than hoping it will not.