Google Workspace Backup Pricing: Backupify vs Spanning & Others

In this blog post we compare prices & discounting policies for Google Workspace backup solutions. In addition to published list prices, we will review backup vendors' discounting and price negotiation practices.

The information is based on customer and partner feedback that we at afi.ai collect for competitive research and benchmarking.

We ourselves develop a modern Google Workpace backup service. If you want to know more, check the product page or read our other blog post for Google Workspace backup solutions comparison and their review.

As part of our competitive analysis we monitor prices for all major Google Workspace backup solutions. Below we present the results of the price comparison based on customer & partner interviews.

Most backup vendors publish their list prices (i.e. prices before discounts) and lincensing on their websites. Backupify and most other vendors price their Google Workspace backup services at $3 per user per month. Spanning and SysCloud price their subscriptions at $4 per user per month, which makes them the most expensive G Suite backup solutions when looking at the headline prices.

As you can see on the chart above, list prices for most vendors differ significantly from actual selling prices after discounts. If you compare Backupify vs Spanning G Suite backup solely based on their list prices, you may incorrectly conclude that Spanning's solution is 33% more expensive vs Backupify ($4 vs $3 per user per month). But the actual difference in pricing is approximately 20%, if the effective selling prices (after discounts) are compared.

We believe that Backupify provides one of the lowest price levels (after discounts) - approx. $2.4 per G Suite seat per month for organizations with >500 users and you can get even lower price if you license more than 1,000 seats.

SysCloud provides the largest discounts, with the average effective price at $1.6 per user per month for organizatoins with 500+ G Suite users. This number, however, doesn't reflect the price for "regular" businesses.

SysCloud mostly sells to educational institutions and the price levels are significantly lower in that market segment. All vendors (not just SysCloud) provide significant educational and non-profit discounts, but for SysCloud this is the primary business focus which lowers their average effective price.

We estimate that SysCloud's average effective price for non-educational customers is similar to that of Spanning ($2.6 per G Suite user).

Spanning has higher list price ($4 per G Suite seat) and provides slightly lower discounts - approx. 35% ($2.6 net price per G Suite user), which leaves their effective prices higher than Backupify.

On average, medium organizations with >100 seats can achieve 7-13% discount from list prices, with cheapest discounted price provided by Backupify. Large customers with 1,000s of employees can achieve as high as 25% discounts off the list prices.

archiving users free, multi-year commitments, key cost- storage, no true unlim - either explicit or implicit, price ultimately depends on storage

We have seen that organizations with more than 200 G Suite users experience flexible terms from Backupify, Spanning, as well as most other vendors. As discussed in previous section, customers are often able to achieve discounts of 10-25%, depending on payment terms, deployment size and type of the product (basic edition, or advanced/premium editions & bundles).

When considering G Suite backup solutions, it's important for customers to know what are the relevant factors in negotiating pricing & discounts. Below are the four most important factors.

Total dollar amount of the deal

Larger deals are more likely to involve deeper discounts. Backup vendors routinely provide >5% discounts for deals above $5,000 in annual contract value.

Size of the end-customer

Large organizations (1,000+ headcount) tend to receive larger discounts as part of vendors' "land and expand" sales strategy (where vendors would close an unprofitable deal expecting to sell more to the same organization the future).

In our experience customers are more likely to receive the "size" discounts in Backupify vs Spanning and other vendors.

Type/version of product purchased

Backup vendors more willingly discount prices on their premium products and bundles (such as G Suite backup + DLP, G Suite Backup + security) compared to basic editions of G Suite backup products.

Customer industry / type

Vendors often provide special pricing for Education and Non-profit organizations, mirroring Google's policy of subsidizing G Suite for these industries. Price points for these types of customers may be 2-3x lower that "regular" prices and vendors may offer special licensing. E.g. when a school licenses all of its staff users vendors may offer to back up the students' data for free or at a significant discount (4-5x cheaper than staff).

In addition to volume discounts, cloud backup vendors offer multiple editions of their backup products, offering advanced features as part of more expensive options.

For example, SysCloud includes Data Leak prevention in its second tier, which is $7 /month is more expensive than its basic plan priced at $4 /month. Spinbackup prices its most expensive subscription (SpinOne) at $9 / month, 3x more expensive than the basic $3 / month subscription.

Despite the higher price levels of the premium backup products, their actual prices after discounts are often lower than the list prices of the cheaper "basic" Google Workspace backup subscriptions.

Large customers with 1,000s of users often purchase a combination of G Suite package options, e.g. 500 G Suite Enterprise SKUs and 500 G Suite Business SKUs are merged to produce a custom package to satisfy their needs.

In addition, Backupify and other G Suite backup solution providers often customize pricing to accommodate the large client's requests to mix licenses.

In one case a educational organization with significant number of "light" student users was able to achieve 70%+ discount for "basic" SysCloud G Suite backup licenses for their students, as the backup vendor acknowledged their limited data usage and protection requirements. At the same time, the educational organization purchased several hundreds of "premium" backup licenses with the same 70%+ discount.

If you are able to demonstrate that a significant part of your G Suite accounts has consistently low usage, you are likely to be able to negotiate additional discount. Lower G Suite data usage means lower support and infrastructure costs for backup vendors, and they would typically pass some of the savings to the customers.

We at Afi.ai also provide volume and non-profit discounts. We also have the most straightforward licensing model on the market:

• We charge for active users, and you do not need to license archived users (users that you deleted from Google Workspace, but whose backups are kept in Afi). This helps our customers save on G Suite licensing, while retaining their backups (available for restore and export at any time)
• You do not need to license Team Drives separately. As long as you license your users, Team Drives backup is included in your subscription. If you want to backup only Team Drives, we'll provide you a custom quote.
• We have transparent storage licensing and we think it is important. Many vendors use obscure marketing language and smallprint in order to advertize "unlimited" backup storage, only to terminate your backup account when they deem that you have too much data. If you deal with a cloud backup vendor that is not upfront about their storage limitations then you carry a significant risk of the account termination (storage is the main cost component of cloud backup and it is always important for vendors).

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