Backup pricing without the three-year handshake

Most backup platforms want a multi-year commitment, an auto-renewal clause and a phone call before they'll tell you the price. We publish ours, and you can leave after the first invoice.

Master Services Agreement
Term: 36 months, auto-renewing
Locked in
Nothing to sign. Cancel any time after the first invoice.
The quote vs the invoice

The number you signed for isn't the number you pay

Estates grow. Retention stacks up. Workloads get counted separately. Add an annual escalation clause and by year three you're paying meaningfully more than the figure that won your business — on a contract you can't leave.

Quoted at signup Actually invoiced

Illustrative. The point isn't the exact numbers — it's that you can't model them in advance, which makes it impossible to price your own service with confidence.

Auto-renewal

The deadline isn't the renewal date

A 60-day notice period means the real decision point is two months before the date in your calendar. Miss it and the contract renews itself — for another year, or another three.

Renewal date — the one in your calendar
Cancellation window — closes 60 days earlier
Miss it, and you have renewed

The average MSP runs dozens of vendor agreements at once. Tracking every notice window across all of them is a full-time job nobody has been given.

Commitment

Three years is a long time to be wrong

Your customers can leave with a month's notice. If your platform is on a three-year term, you carry that risk for the whole of it. We don't ask for one.

Three-year term

36 months · auto-renewing

Committed on day one for an estate you can't predict. A customer churning in month three doesn't reduce what you owe, and the exit is thirty-three months away.

Monthly, cancel any time

No contract · no notice period

Measured and invoiced each month. You can stop after the first one. The bill follows the estate in both directions, so your cost moves when your revenue does.

Storage

Allocated, or actually used?

Buying storage in blocks means paying for headroom you haven't filled. Measuring consumption means you don't.

Billed on allocation

You buy the block, you pay for the block
billed

Paying for 10 TB. Storing 4 TB.

Billed on usage

Measured monthly, moves both ways
billed

Storing 4 TB. Paying for 4 TB.

How BOBcloud prices

Three lines. That's the whole model.

Modular pricing: the devices and users you protect, plus the storage you consume. Billed monthly.

Device licences

from £3.00 per device / month

£3.00 a month for a Windows or macOS desktop, £7.80 for a Windows or Linux server. Hypervisors and NAS devices are licensed separately. You pay only for the licences you have allocated.

User licences

£1.20 per user / month

£1.20 a month covers a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace user — mail, drive, sites and Teams data under the same licence, with no per-feature add-on.

Storage

from £20 per TB / month

£0.02/GB on Wasabi EU (£20 per TB) or £0.06/GB on Azure UK South (£60 per TB), billed on what you actually store. Bring your own S3-compatible destination and there is no storage charge from us at all.

Every rate, in one table

All prices per month, excluding VAT. Nothing here is gated behind a quote.

What you are protectingPrice / monthIncluded
Windows or Linux server£7.80 Files, system state, bare metal, MS SQL, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Tibero, Proxmox VE
Windows PC or Mac£3.00 Files, Windows System bare metal, cloud sources (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive)
Microsoft 365 user£1.20 Email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams
Google Workspace user£1.20 Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar and Chat
Hyper-V or VMware VM£3.00 VM backup, snapshots and instant recovery
Exchange mailbox£0.70 Individual mailbox-level backup
Synology or QNAP NAS£7.20 Shares and snapshot protection
Storage — Wasabi EU£0.02/GB £20 per TB, measured on actual usage
Storage — Azure UK South£0.06/GB £60 per TB, measured on actual usage
Storage — your own destination£0.00 Any S3-compatible target, Backblaze B2, Azure, SFTP or local NAS. You pay your provider, not us.

Two worked examples

Wholesale cost to you as the reseller. What you charge your own customer is your decision.

A small MSP: 5 servers, 30 desktops, 40 M365 users, 2 TB

5 servers × £7.80£39.00
30 desktops × £3.00£90.00
40 M365 users × £1.20£48.00
2 TB on Wasabi EU£40.00
Total£217.00/mo

A larger estate: 20 servers, 120 desktops, 200 M365 users, 12 TB

20 servers × £7.80£156.00
120 desktops × £3.00£360.00
200 M365 users × £1.20£240.00
12 TB on Wasabi EU£240.00
Total£996.00/mo

Excluding VAT. Storage is measured on actual consumption, so these figures move with the estate in both directions. Supply your own storage destination and the storage line disappears entirely.

Model your own estate on the calculator. It's public, needs no login, and takes your real device and user counts. If the number doesn't work for you, you'll know in two minutes rather than after a discovery call.

Included

Not billed as extras

Restores — no egress or retrieval charge
White-label portal under your own brand
UK-based technical support
All backup modules — no per-feature upsell
AES-256 client-side encryption
Reseller API access
Monthly billing, cancel any time
Optional upgrade

Immutable object-lock storage

Backups written to object-locked storage cannot be altered or deleted by anyone, including you, for a fixed 90-day retention period. Priced separately and enabled per customer — it isn't switched on unless you choose it.

How the models differ

Four ways backup vendors charge, and what each does to your margin

Comparing headline rates between platforms rarely works, because the platforms don't charge for the same things. It's the billing model that decides what you actually pay over three years — and how easily you can price your own service.

Model 1

Appliance plus subscription

Hardware sits on the customer site with a term subscription attached. Fast local recovery, but capital is committed up front per site and the term is usually measured in years. Growth means another appliance.

Model 2

Per-workload, storage bundled

A single rate per protected workload with an allowance of storage included. Simple until the allowance runs out, at which point overage rates apply — and those are often the part that isn't published.

Model 3

Per-socket or per-VM licensing

Common in the virtualisation-first platforms. Predictable while your customers' host counts are stable; less so when a customer consolidates or expands, since the licence follows the infrastructure rather than the data.

Model 4

Per-device and per-user, storage metered

What we do. Licences follow what you protect, storage follows what you store, and both are measured monthly. No allowance to exceed, no egress charge on restores, and nothing to commit to beyond the first invoice.

The question worth asking any vendor. Not “what does it cost” but “what does it cost in year three, if this customer doubles their data and that one leaves?” If the answer needs a call, the model is doing the work the price list should be doing.

Questions

The ones we actually get asked

How much does cloud backup cost per TB in the UK?
On BOBcloud, storage is £0.02/GB on Wasabi EU — £20 per terabyte per month — or £0.06/GB on Azure UK South, which is £60 per terabyte. Storage is metered on what you actually hold rather than what you have allocated, and restores carry no egress or retrieval charge. Device and user licences are billed separately, starting at £3.00 per desktop and £7.80 per server per month.
What does backup cost for a typical small MSP?
An MSP protecting 5 servers, 30 desktops, 40 Microsoft 365 users and 2 TB of data pays £217 a month at wholesale rates, excluding VAT. Scale that to 20 servers, 120 desktops, 200 users and 12 TB and it is £996 a month. Both figures are the cost to you as the reseller; your retail pricing is entirely your own.
Can I model this before talking to anyone?
Yes. The calculator is public and needs no login or email address. Enter your device and user counts and you'll get a monthly figure.
What happens when a customer's data grows?
Storage is measured monthly on actual usage, so it moves with the estate in both directions. Licence counts change only when you add or remove protected devices and users.
Is there a charge to restore?
No. Restores are not metered and there is no egress fee on BOBcloud-provided storage. If you bring your own storage destination, that provider's own charges would apply.
What's the minimum?
There is no minimum device count, no minimum spend and no contract. Billing is monthly and you can cancel any time after the first invoice. Immutable object-lock storage is an optional upgrade; if you enable it, that data carries a 90-day retention period before it can be erased.
Can I use my own storage?
Yes. Hundreds of S3-compatible destinations are supported, alongside UK-hosted storage and Azure UK South. You pay licences only where you supply the storage.
Who is BOBcloud?
A UK white-label cloud backup platform for MSPs and IT resellers, operated by SCDC Limited in Corsham, Wiltshire. We have run backup services since 1999 and hold Cyber Essentials certification.

Work out the number yourself

The calculator is open to anyone. No form, no login, no follow-up call unless you ask for one.