Pricing for M365 backup is genuinely confusing because the options span wildly different models — consumption-based, per-user subscription, per-seat licensing, and hybrid combinations. The number you get from a vendor website rarely reflects what you'll actually pay at your scale with your data volumes.
Let's walk through the real cost math for each major approach, with honest assumptions about typical enterprise storage sizes.
Microsoft 365 Backup (Native) — Consumption Pricing
Microsoft prices its native M365 Backup at roughly $0.15 per GB of protected storage per month. That sounds trivial until you account for actual SharePoint data sizes. A mid-size organization with 300 users and 5TB of SharePoint data would spend about $750/month — $9,000/year — just on protected SharePoint storage, before adding Exchange and OneDrive. Organizations with significant SharePoint content, like engineering or legal firms with large file libraries, often see 20–50TB in SharePoint alone.
The native approach also stores backup data inside Microsoft's infrastructure. If you need to meet data residency requirements that mandate your backup exists outside your primary cloud provider, this option doesn't satisfy that requirement.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 — Per-User Licensing
Veeam licenses per M365 user. Published pricing for Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 runs from approximately $7 to $18 per user per year depending on tier, feature set, and whether you're using Veeam's hosted cloud repos or managing your own storage. For 300 users, you're looking at roughly $2,100–$5,400 per year in licensing alone, plus the cost of running the Veeam infrastructure (a Windows Server, storage for the backup repo, ongoing maintenance).
The infrastructure cost is often underestimated. A Veeam deployment that can handle 300 users with 30-day retention and reasonable restore performance needs meaningful compute and storage. If you're using Veeam Cloud Connect repos, add approximately $0.10–$0.20 per GB per month. It adds up.
Third-Party Purpose-Built Solutions
Vendors like North Brook Vault take a different approach: you pay a per-seat or per-user subscription that includes the backup software and operation, and you supply your own S3-compatible storage. This separates the software cost from the storage cost in a way that lets you optimize each independently.
S3 storage costs vary significantly by provider. AWS S3 Standard runs about $0.023 per GB per month. Cloudflare R2 is $0.015 per GB with no egress fees, which matters when you're doing frequent restores. MinIO on your own hardware can get the storage cost down dramatically if you have the infrastructure. For 5TB of backup data, you're looking at roughly $70–$115/month in storage costs with cloud providers — much less on-premise.
What the Real Total Looks Like
For a 300-user organization with 5TB of SharePoint and reasonable Exchange/OneDrive volumes:
Microsoft native: ~$12,000–$18,000/year (consumption-based, storage-heavy). Veeam: ~$4,000–$8,000/year in licensing plus $2,000–$5,000/year in infrastructure and cloud repos. Purpose-built with BYO S3: $3,000–$6,000/year in software subscription plus $900–$1,500/year in S3 storage.
The right answer depends on whether your organization values simplicity (Microsoft native), established tooling with a mature ecosystem (Veeam), or cost efficiency with data sovereignty control (purpose-built with your own storage). What none of the options should make you do is go without backup at all — which is more expensive than any of these when an incident occurs.