The three common pricing models
Per-user pricing is typical for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup. You pay a monthly amount for each licensed user, and their mailbox, OneDrive and share of SharePoint are included, often with generous or unlimited storage. It is easy to budget and grows naturally with headcount, but check whether shared mailboxes and departed users count as users.
Per-device pricing is common for servers and laptops, with servers usually costing more than workstations. Per-gigabyte or per-terabyte pricing charges for the storage consumed, sometimes on top of a device fee. Many offices end up with a mix: per-user for cloud apps and per-device plus storage for a server. Ask for a quote that shows each part separately.
Data volume and change rate
The more you store, the more you pay on storage-based plans. But the raw size of your server is only part of the story. After the first full backup, most services store only the changes, so a business whose data changes a lot each day, for example through large CAD files, video or a busy database, uses more backup storage than one whose files mostly sit still.
Before getting quotes, find out roughly how much data you have in each place and how quickly it grows. Cleaning out duplicates, old installers and personal media before the first backup can noticeably shrink both the initial upload and the ongoing bill. It is also worth checking whether any large folders are already copies of data held elsewhere, such as a duplicated photo library or an old migration folder nobody deleted.
Retention length
Keeping a month of history costs less than keeping a year, and a year costs less than seven. Each additional restore point holds a little more changed data. Immutable storage also adds cost, because locked copies must be kept for the full lock period even if you would otherwise prune them sooner.
Match retention to real needs instead of choosing the longest option available. A layered approach, with daily copies for a few weeks and monthly copies for a year or more, gives most of the protection at a fraction of the cost of keeping every daily copy forever. Revisit the settings once a year, since storage prices and your needs both shift over time.
Restore speed and recovery features
Basic cloud backup stores your data cheaply and lets you download it when needed. Faster recovery costs more. A local backup appliance that can run a failed server within minutes, or a cloud service that can start your servers in a data centre, adds hardware and subscription costs but cuts downtime dramatically.
Weigh this against what downtime costs you. If your team of fifteen cannot work without the server, a day of downtime may cost far more than a year of a faster recovery option. If the server only holds old archives, cheaper storage with a slower restore is perfectly reasonable. The point is to make that trade-off on purpose rather than discover it during an outage.
Costs people forget to ask about
Some services charge to download or restore data, known as egress fees. That can make a large restore after a disaster unexpectedly expensive. Others charge for shipping a physical drive with your data on it, which can be faster than downloading terabytes. Ask about minimum terms, price rises at renewal, charges for keeping data from users who have left, and what it costs to export everything if you change provider.
Labour is the other hidden cost. Someone has to set the backup up properly, check it daily, investigate failures and run test restores. A cheap product nobody monitors can cost far more in the end than a properly managed one, because the failure only shows up on the day you need it.
Comparing quotes fairly
Line up quotes against the same requirements: what is covered, how often it backs up, how long copies are kept, whether a copy is immutable, how fast a full restore is, where the data is stored, and who monitors and tests it. A low price that leaves out SharePoint, shared mailboxes or a database server is not a like-for-like comparison.
If you are quoting through an IT provider, ask them to list the backup product, the storage location and the retention settings in writing. It makes renewals easier and lets anyone check later that you are getting what you pay for. A short written specification also helps when you compare offers at renewal, because you can hand the same page to each supplier.
In short
- Cost depends on data volume, change rate, retention and restore speed.
- Per-user pricing suits cloud apps; servers are usually per device plus storage.
- Ask about restore fees, renewal increases and leaver data before signing.
- Compare quotes against the same written requirements.