Every cloud backup quote looks reasonable right up until the first real restore.
The per-GB storage rate is the headline figure, but it’s rarely the number that ends up on your invoice. Egress charges, API request fees, minimum retention penalties, and retrieval costs on colder tiers all sit beneath that headline price, and they only show up once you actually need to use the service you’re paying for.
If you’ve never sat down and worked out what your cloud backup actually costs once restores, data growth, and vendor add-ons are factored in, you’re not alone. Most IT leaders haven’t, which is exactly why so many get caught out.
The sticker price isn’t the real price
Hyperscale providers commonly charge in the region of £0.08 to £0.12 per GB to move data out of their environment, so restoring a 50TB environment after an incident can trigger a bill running into the thousands, on top of whatever you already pay each month for storage. Analyst estimates suggest egress fees alone can account for 10-15% of total cloud spend, sometimes more depending on usage patterns, and because those charges are tied to activity rather than a flat rate, they’re notoriously hard to forecast.
The costs that catch teams out tend to fall into a small number of recurring categories: minimum retention penalties, full-restore egress fees, and charges for object versioning or snapshot sprawl that nobody is actively tracking. None of these show up as a clean line item on the quote you signed. They show up on the invoice after a restore, a compliance audit, or twelve months of data growth nobody budgeted for.
Put those elements together and it’s not unusual for egress and API charges to inflate a monthly bill by well over half the advertised per-GB rate. That makes the “cheapest” provider on paper a very different proposition once you actually use the service the way it’s designed to be used: to restore data when you need it most, often under pressure.
Why this matters for ROI, not just budgeting
Backup is insurance. You don’t buy it to use it every day, you buy it so that the one time you do need it, the data comes back quickly and the bill doesn’t become a second incident on top of the first.
That’s where a lot of cloud backup ROI conversations go wrong. They compare storage rates in isolation, without asking what a real recovery actually costs, how long it takes, and whether the provider’s model rewards you for testing your DR plan or penalises you for it. A backup platform that charges every time you restore or test isn’t just expensive, it quietly discourages the exact behaviour that makes backup worth having in the first place.
A proper ROI view has to include:
- The cost of a full restore, not just the cost of storing the data
- The cost of testing your disaster recovery plan regularly, since untested backups are a false sense of security
- The time cost of recovery, measured in hours of downtime, not just pounds on an invoice
- The predictability of your monthly spend, since unbudgeted charges cause just as much pain as high ones
A quick checklist: What is actually in your total cost of ownership?
Before you can compare providers fairly, it helps to know what to ask for. When reviewing your current setup or a new quote, check whether the following are included, excluded, or charged separately:
- Storage cost per TB, per month
- Egress or data retrieval fees on restore
- API/operation charges (PUTs, GETs, LIST requests)
- Minimum retention periods and early-deletion penalties
- Charges for DR testing or failover
- Support and management overhead, including who actually manages the platform day to day
If you can’t answer all of those from your current contract, that’s usually a sign your all-in cost is higher than the number you think you’re paying.
The Nexstor approach: predictable costs, built around your existing Veeam investment
We built our cloud backup service, delivered via Veeam Cloud Connect and Nexstor.Cloud, around a simple principle: you should be able to work out what backup costs before you sign, not after a restore.
That means:
- No charges for egress or data retrieval. You pay for what you back up, not what you get back. Restoring shouldn’t cost more than storing.
- No API or operation fees. Puts, gets, and deletions aren’t billed separately, so there’s no incentive to think twice before testing a restore.
- Simple, granular pricing based on the amount of data you protect and the number of VMs, so your bill scales predictably with your environment rather than with how often you use it.
- Built on your existing Veeam licences, so there’s no forklift upgrade or re-platforming to get started. Veeam Cloud Connect handles the heavy lifting, using WAN acceleration and a Cloud Gateway to move data securely offsite over the internet rather than through a VPN tunnel, following the 3-2-1 principle of data protection.
- A UK service desk, available around the clock, so when you do need to restore, you’re talking to someone who understands the platform, not working through a support queue on your own.
The result is a model where testing your DR plan doesn’t come with a bill attached, and where the number on your quote is much closer to the number on your invoice twelve months later.
Get an instant Nexstor backup quote now.
Working out your own numbers
You don’t need a finance degree to build a fair comparison. Take your current provider’s published rates and apply them to a realistic scenario: a full restore of your largest workload, plus one DR test per quarter. Add that to your monthly storage cost over a year, and compare the total to a flat, consumption-based model with no egress or API charges. For most businesses backing up any meaningful volume of data, the gap is bigger than expected, and it grows every time a restore or a test happens.
If you’d like a hand running that comparison against your own environment, that’s a conversation we’re always happy to have. It usually takes less time than reading a cloud provider’s pricing page in full. Book a meeting and speak to a Nexstor specialist.
