Backup Pricing Guide for Small Business Teams and Startups

Modern businesses rely on remote and distributed workforces with a mix of company-issued and personal phones, tablets, and laptops, and workstations. Without backups, when a device is lost, stolen, breaks, or is victim to a cybersecurity incident, valuable data is irretrievably lost. This results in remediation costs, wasted time redoing work, and the potential loss of information that cannot be recreated.

This makes affordable backups for small businesses a necessity. Endpoint and mobile device backups must be convenient, reliable, and, importantly, feasible within your budget. This article explores data backup pricing guide for small businesses, including how you should assess the value and protection different products provide to your business.

Why backup pricing is tough to assess for small businesses and startups

Different backup products target different use cases, with different features that may not be necessary for everyone. Different backup strategies also result in variable costs, depending on how much data, how many devices, and how frequently your data changes, and your resulting RTO and RPO objectives.

Vital business data no longer just exists in centralized file servers and sync services like OneDrive. While core business data should be consolidated and backed up according to a 3-2-1 backup plan, data will inevitably exist on end-user devices that should also be backed up, both to capture production data and to ensure a quick recovery and return to productivity.

Due to these highly variable factors, backup pricing is difficult to directly compare. Tech teams must work with stakeholders to develop a backup plan that meets their requirements and sufficiently protects their data at an appropriate cadence, then choose a compatible, compliant solution that enables this.

How backup pricing is structured

The backup solution you select needs to fit with your long-term goals and budget. A solution that is too expensive and does not scale predictably may become untenable, leading to coverage gaps. Changing your backup solution later can be disruptive and lead to disjointed systems that hamper recovery.

There are several typical ways backup pricing is structured that you should understand.

Per-user pricing

Per-user pricing is a simple subscription structure that covers multiple devices per employee. This simplifies billing, however there’s usually a per-user storage limit that can be restrictive if users have more than a few devices that need to be backed up.

Per-device pricing

Per-device subscriptions are charged per phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or other device. It’s predictable for small teams, and as the storage limit is per-device, it scales well.

However, you may need to consider which devices need to be backed up. Per-device pricing may seem similar to per-user pricing, but it scales differently. As users have an increasing number of devices, covering all of them may not be cost-effective.

Storage-based pricing

Storage-based pricing ignores the number of devices and bills based only on the storage space your backups occupy on the backup service. This is measured per-gigabyte or per-terabyte.

Some backup solutions may charge a lower per-user or per-device subscription fee with a base storage allowance, and charge extra for storage over that. Others may do the same, but allow you to ‘bring your own’ storage by connecting your own servers or cloud-based solutions like object storage.

What affects backup costs for small teams

The goal of every business is to grow. This affects the choice of backup solutions in two significant ways.

• Growth is stifled if there are operational, financial, compliance/legal, or other disruptions to your business caused by data loss.
• As your business grows, your backup requirements will change, requiring flexibility and scalability.

To address these, you need to decide on the following requirements:

• Device and user counts: More endpoints increase the total cost.
• Data volume: Larger datasets increase storage costs.
• Backup frequency: More frequent backups require more resources.
• Retention policies: Longer retention periods increase storage usage.
• Security features: Advanced features, including encryption, ransomware protection (immutability), and monitoring, may increase pricing.

To implement cost-effective backup, you must understand what you are backing up.

How to plan a backup budget

While the factors that influence backup costs are unique and varied, most small teams will follow similar strategies when choosing backup products. There are advantages and disadvantages to these:

• Starting with entry-level, basic backups: Low cost-for-entry, but inflexible and feature-limited for long-term use. It may be necessary to switch platforms later.
• Intermediate backup tools for small business: Feature-rich cloud backup tools with scalable pricing, automation, and monitoring lead to more reliable backups. Adopting these earlier may have higher initial costs, but it offers better protection and long-term benefits.
• Advanced backup platforms: Enterprise-grade tools offer advanced security and compliance measures, but these may be overkill for small businesses unless there are specific compliance concerns that are not addressed by small business-oriented tools.

Once a suitable backup tool has been decided on, a backup budget plan can be established by:

• Estimating growth: Plan for increasing data volume to avoid underestimating future costs.
• Choosing scalable plans: Use backup solutions that grow with your needs and avoid fixed limits that may require later migration.
• Reviewing regularly: Adjust backup strategies and plans as data and usage change to prevent unexpectedly high bills.

Balancing backup costs vs. data loss risks: What businesses should consider

The cost of downtime and associated recovery time and effort, as well as the impact of data loss on your business continuity, make backups essential – a modern cost of doing business that no organization can sensibly avoid. However, not every business has the resources for complete, continuous backup coverage that leverages every available advanced feature. You must balance the risks of losing specific datasets with the costs of backing them up.

Even low-cost backups can prevent expensive disruptions, and additional strategies can be employed to lower backup costs, such as categorizing data and omitting ephemeral or unimportant data or data that can be easily recreated from backups, and consolidating data to fewer devices.

What should your backup plan cover?

Your backup plan should cover both backing up end-user devices, servers, and cloud resources, and directly address cost considerations holistically. For small businesses that lack their own centralized infrastructure, device backup combined with backing up the SaaS platforms that you rely on can be sufficient. For medium-to-large businesses, server backup and monitoring is critical, with offsite backups as well as automated cloud backups.

Without oversight and ownership, device backups are ineffective and a wasted investment

For managed service providers (MSPs) who are responsible for protecting the data for multiple companies, oversight of backups is key. Without it, devices can fall out of sync and critical data can be overlooked and lost in an incident. Unifying your IT toolchain helps eliminate these gaps. NinjaOne unifies cloud backup for endpoints and servers, mobile device management (MDM), remote monitoring and management (RMM), helpdesk, and endpoint security tools, allowing you to take proactive measures to protect data, and fall back on pertinent, reliable backups if something does go wrong.

NinjaOne also benefits small businesses and startups that increasingly rely on remote workforces and BYOD backed by SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. NinjaOne’s suite of IT tools is managed, with streamlined onboarding that lets you quickly enroll and start backing up Apple and Android phones and tablets, Windows and macOS laptops and workstations, servers, and files stored in Google Drive and OneDrive.

Pricing is predictable, with per-device, per-month subscriptions for individual features, so it scales with your small business and its evolving needs.