Microsoft 365 Backup Pricing in 2026: What MSPs Actually Pay
Quick answer. Microsoft 365 backup typically costs a UK MSP between £1 and £4 per user per month at wholesale rates. BOBcloud charges £1.20 per user per month, covering Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams — plus storage at £0.02/GB on Wasabi London (£20 per TB), or nothing at all if you supply your own S3-compatible destination. No minimum seat count and no minimum term. In practice that works out at roughly £1.40 per user per month for a typical 40-user customer holding 400 GB.
Disclosure. BOBcloud publishes this article and sells a white-label backup platform to MSPs, Microsoft 365 protection included. Our own rate is below, in full. We haven't put numbers in anyone else's mouth — most vendors in this space don't publish, and quoting figures we can't verify wouldn't help you.
Microsoft 365 backup is usually priced per user per month. That sounds like it should make comparison easy, and it doesn't, because "per user" turns out to mean different things depending on who you ask and what's included underneath it.
This is a practical guide to working out what you'll actually pay, based on 25 years of running backup infrastructure for UK MSPs.
What does Microsoft 365 backup cost per user?
Across the market, wholesale rates for MSPs generally sit somewhere between roughly £1 and £4 per user per month. That's a wide band for what looks like the same product, and the spread comes from four things:
Whether storage is included or metered. A rate with unlimited retention bundled will be higher than one where storage is billed separately. Neither is automatically better value — it depends how much your customers actually hold.
Which workloads are covered. Exchange Online only, or Exchange plus OneDrive plus SharePoint plus Teams? Some platforms price these as separate modules.
Retention length. A rate quoted against 30-day retention and one quoted against seven-year retention are not the same product.
Minimum seat counts. A per-user rate with a 25-seat minimum is a 25-seat rate for any customer smaller than that.
Our rate is £1.20 per user per month, wholesale, covering Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams under one licence (what the module covers). Storage is billed separately. There's no minimum seat count and no minimum term.
Why do you need to back up Microsoft 365 at all?
Worth addressing, because it comes up in every conversation and it's the reason the market exists.
Microsoft operates a shared responsibility model. They guarantee the availability of the service; you remain responsible for the data in it. The native retention features — Recycle Bin, retention policies, litigation hold — are designed for compliance and short-term recovery, not for restoring a customer's SharePoint site after someone deletes a library and nobody notices for three months.
The realistic risks are accidental deletion, malicious deletion by a departing employee, ransomware encrypting synced files, and retention policies expiring data you later needed. None of those are Microsoft failing. All of them are your customer's problem, and by extension yours.
If a customer is relying on file sync for protection, that gap is covered in do I need cloud backup if I have OneDrive?, and the wider question in does Microsoft 365 back up your data?
What usually isn't in the headline rate
Five things that show up later. Ask about each explicitly, in writing, before you sign.
Egress and restore charges. Some platforms meter data leaving the system. This one bites hardest, because you incur it exactly when a customer is already having a bad day and you're least placed to have a conversation about cost. Our restores aren't metered.
Overage rates. Where storage is bundled with an allowance, the rate beyond that allowance is the rate that matters over three years. It's frequently the number that isn't published.
Per-workload add-ons. Teams chat protection, SharePoint site collections and granular Exchange item recovery are sometimes separate modules. A low base rate with three required add-ons isn't a low rate.
Minimum commitments. Both minimum spend and minimum seats. Worth checking against your smallest customer, not your largest.
Renewal escalation. Ask what the increase has been at renewal for each of the last three years, and ask for it in writing. This is the single most common complaint we hear from MSPs arriving from larger platforms, and it's the least visible thing at the point of signing.
How the billing models differ
Comparing headline rates between platforms rarely works, because the platforms aren't charging for the same unit. Four approaches dominate:
Per-user, storage bundled. One rate, storage allowance included. Simplest to resell. Establish the overage rate before you commit.
Per-user, storage metered. Two lines on the invoice, but no allowance to exceed and no cliff edge. This is what we do — the trade is that it's marginally harder to package into a flat retail price.
Per-workload. Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint priced separately. Granular, and fine if your customers only need one of them. Expensive if they need all three.
Bundled into a wider stack. Backup included alongside RMM, PSA and security from a single vendor. If reducing the number of suppliers you manage is worth more to you than pricing flexibility, that's a legitimate preference — and it's one we don't offer.
Where does the backup data actually live?
Three options, and the choice changes what you pay.
Wasabi London at £0.02/GB — £20 per terabyte per month. Data sits in the United Kingdom, and there is no egress or retrieval charge from us when you restore. This is what most of our resellers use.
Azure UK South at £0.06/GB — £60 per terabyte. Also UK-resident, so the choice between this and Wasabi is rarely about data residency. It is offered because some customer contracts name Microsoft Azure specifically, or a client already has an Azure commitment they want to draw down.
Your own destination — no storage charge at all. Point backups at any S3-compatible target, Backblaze B2, your own Azure tenancy, SFTP, or a NAS in your own rack. If you already buy storage at volume, or a customer insists their data stays on infrastructure they control, you pay us for licences only and settle storage with your own provider.
That last option is worth modelling before you assume a bundled competitor is cheaper. An MSP with existing storage contracts is comparing our licence-only cost against a rival's all-in rate, which is a different sum from the one on the quote.
A worked example
An MSP protecting 40 Microsoft 365 users with 400 GB of mail and file data:
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| 40 users × £1.20 | £48.00 |
| 400 GB on Wasabi London × £0.02 | £8.00 |
| Total | £56.00 / month |
That's £1.40 per user all in. Add the rest of a typical estate — 5 servers at £7.80 and 30 desktops at £3.00 — and it's £217.00 per month for the lot, including 2 TB of storage.
Those are wholesale figures. What you charge your customers is entirely your decision, and most MSPs we work with price Microsoft 365 backup somewhere between £3 and £5 per user retail.
You can model your own numbers on our cost calculator, which is public and needs no login, or see every rate on our pricing page.
Where we're not the right answer
Three situations where we'd point you elsewhere.
You want everything from one vendor. If backup arriving in the same invoice as your RMM and PSA matters more than pricing flexibility, a bundled stack suits you better than we do.
You need sub-hour recovery of a whole site. For Microsoft 365 specifically this rarely applies, but if a customer's wider tolerance is measured in minutes and they need servers virtualised locally while you rebuild, an on-site appliance does that better than any cloud-only platform, ours included.
You only want storage. If you already have backup software you're happy with and you're shopping for a destination, buying from a storage provider directly will cost less than buying a platform from us.
The question worth asking every vendor
Not "what does it cost" — you'll get a number that's true on the day and decreasingly true afterwards.
Ask instead: what does this cost in year three, if that customer doubles their data and this one leaves?
If answering requires a call, the pricing model is doing work a price list should be doing. That isn't disqualifying — plenty of good platforms price this way — but it tells you that modelling your own margin will be an ongoing exercise rather than a one-off.
And whatever you're quoted, get the renewal terms, the overage rate and the egress position in writing before you sign. The headline rate is the part of the contract least likely to surprise you.