If you manage Microsoft 365 for clients, “how much does backup cost?” sounds like it should have a one-line answer. It almost never does — not because the math is hard, but because most of the industry quotes you one number and bills you on four.
This is how to read a Microsoft 365 backup quote: the per-user rate, the storage and egress line, the add-ons, and the fees that only show up on the invoice. Then, because hiding it is the actual problem, exactly what VaultFuzion charges.
The headline: per user, per month
Microsoft 365 backup is sold per user per month — one rate for each mailbox and its OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams data. “Office 365 backup” is the same thing under Microsoft’s former name. The rate usually falls as the seat count rises, which is why a 50-seat client and a 5,000-seat client are quoted very differently.
What you usually cannot do is see the rate. Most M365-backup vendors gate pricing behind a sales call. That is a choice, and it is worth asking why: a published rate is a rate you can hold the vendor to.
Cost driver #2: storage and egress
Backups live somewhere, and someone pays for that somewhere. There are two models.
Vendor-provided storage, folded into the per-seat price or billed on top. Convenient, but you do not see the storage bill and you rarely see the egress rate — the per-GB charge to pull your data out. Egress is the line you discover during a restore, which is the worst possible time to discover it.
Bring-your-own-storage (BYOS): the backup writes to an S3 bucket in your cloud account. You pay your provider directly, at a rate you negotiated, on a bill you can see beforehand. The vendor is not in that transaction at all.
If a quote does not mention storage or egress, that is not “included” — it is unstated. Ask.
Cost driver #3: add-ons
The base backup covers Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. The things that commonly cost extra:
Identity and Entra ID backup — usually priced per tenant, not per seat (and worth it: the thing being protected is the directory configuration, which does not grow when the client hires).
eDiscovery and legal holds — often a separate line.
Longer retention or compliance features — sometimes gated behind a higher tier.
None of these are wrong to charge for. They are wrong to surprise you with.
Cost driver #4: the fees on the invoice
The ones that never appear in the per-seat quote:
Onboarding or setup fees — one-time, sometimes per tenant (ask: per MSP, or per client?).
Payment-processing fees — a percentage added to each invoice.
Storage overage — a per-GB charge if you exceed an allowance (bring-your-own-storage models usually have none, because there is no allowance to exceed).
Minimum seat commitments — a floor you pay for whether or not the seats exist.
Add these up before you compare two “per-seat” numbers, or you are comparing two different things.
What VaultFuzion charges, published in full
Because the hiding is the problem, here is the whole thing. Kapsul8 Microsoft 365 backup, per user per month, before any term discount:
$1.99 — 1 to 9 seats (Starter). $1.49 — 10 to 99 (Growth). $0.99 — 100 to 999 (Scale). $0.79 — 1,000 or more (Volume).
A one-, three- or five-year commitment takes 10%, 18% or 25% off the seat rate — so the Volume band is $0.59 a seat on a five-year term. There is no seat minimum, and every band runs the identical product; the volume changes the price, never the feature set.
Storage: BYOS — your bucket, your cloud account, and we charge nothing for storage. Prefer a bucket we provide? Direct customers are billed at our documented cost, with no margin. No egress surprise either way.
Add-ons: Entra ID backup (VentraID) is per tenant — $49, $99, $199 or $349 a month by tier. eDiscovery (EvidenceVault) is quoted per tenant. You turn each on only for the clients that need it.
Fees: no onboarding or setup fee on the Microsoft 365 or Entra ID services. A partner’s invoice carries a 3.5% payment-processing fee on its own line; a direct customer’s does not.
Price changes: your rate holds; we change list pricing only on notice (30 days month-to-month, 60 days on a committed term), and if a change does not suit you, you can leave the affected subscriptions with no early-termination fee.
How to turn a quote into a number you can compare
Four questions turn any M365-backup quote into a comparable number: what is the per-seat rate at my volume? Who owns the storage bucket and what is the egress rate? Which workloads and features cost extra? And what fees are on the invoice that are not in the quote? A vendor that can answer all four in writing is one you can budget around. One that cannot is one you will be surprised by.