Pricing a backup product honestly

Backup pricing is usually a per-seat number attached to a tier, which is a strange way to charge for something whose cost to run has nothing to do with how many people log in.

We meter four things instead, and this post is about what each one is and which of them you should actually care about.

The four

Computation is time a run spends executing. Storage is working space held while it is in flight. Transit is bytes moved, in either direction. Archive is what you are keeping, sampled once a day.

The shape of that drawing is the useful part. Three of the four are bounded by how long a backup takes. The fourth accrues every day the data sits there, whether or not anything ran.

What this means if you push from CI

If you produce backups in your own pipeline and push them, you generate almost no computation at all: the run happened on your hardware, on your time. Your bill is archive plus the transit to get the bytes to us.

That is a materially cheaper shape, and we would rather tell you than have you discover it. It is also the shape we think most people should start with, for reasons that have nothing to do with the invoice.

The line item that is genuinely hard

Egress is the expensive byte in this business, and it is the one every backup vendor has to make a decision about. There are three options and none of them are clean:

• Charge for restores at cost. Correct, and it means the worst day of your year also generates a bill you did not plan for.
• Make restores free. Sounds generous, and it means restore cost is priced into everyone's storage, so the customers who never restore subsidise the ones who do.
• Make restores free up to a limit. Now there is a limit, and limits on getting your data back are exactly the thing a backup product should not have.

We charge transit in both directions at one rate. It is not the perfect answer; it is the one we can explain in a sentence, and it keeps the promise that matters separate from the price.

No seats

Members are capped as a blast-radius limit, not a price. A workspace of one and a workspace of twenty pay the same for the same usage, because the number of people who can log in has no relationship to what it costs us to keep your data.

What we will not pretend

These rates are measured against our own infrastructure cost, and if that cost moves they will move. What will not happen is a change applied backwards to a period you have already used.

Anyone who tells you their backup pricing is final has either been running much longer than us or has not looked closely at their egress bill.