Most IT people who want recurring revenue look at hosting, managed services or SaaS reselling. Very few look at backup - which is odd, because backup is the one service a small business cannot argue its way out of once it has lost data.
The numbers behind that demand are brutal. In 2026 just over half of ransomware attacks still managed to encrypt data, the median ransom demand reached US$769,000 and average recovery costs climbed to around US$1.7 million, according to Sophos' State of Ransomware 2026. Only about one in three smaller organisations stopped an attack before encryption.
That is not a scare statistic, it is a market description. Millions of small companies run with no tested backup, no offsite copy and no idea what a restore would actually cost them. If you can sell a backup service that genuinely works on the day it is needed, you have a recurring-revenue line with very low running costs.
This is what the business looks like from the inside - the four models, the real vendor prices, the margins, and the launch steps. The full version with the step-by-step plan and the quote template is on Tân IT365.
Four ways to sell backup (pick one, then mix)
Managed backup for local businesses. You install the software, point it at storage you control (a local NAS plus a cloud target), monitor the jobs, test restores and report monthly. Highest margin, because the client buys the outcome and never touches the software.
Cloud-to-cloud backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Microsoft and Google do not restore what their users delete. Mail, SharePoint, Drive and Teams data is the customer's problem. This is the fastest-growing niche because the sales line is a question: who restores the mailbox your employee deleted 90 days ago? No site visit required.
White-label reselling. Licence a multi-tenant platform (Comet Backup, MSP360 Managed Backup, WholesaleBackup and similar), bring your own storage and resell under your own brand. Low technical barrier, but you compete on price, so gross margins land nearer 60-70% than 80%.
A vertical niche. Accountants, dental clinics, law offices, pharmacies, e-commerce sellers and schools have compliance-driven needs and will pay a premium for a provider who speaks their language. A niche provider at US$20-25 per endpoint out-earns a generalist at US$10.
The cost has two layers, and confusing them is how people price at a loss
Layer one is the software or platform.
| Platform | Published price | Storage |
|---|---|---|
| Comet Backup | From US$49/month cloud-hosted, plus from US$2/endpoint/month | Yours or theirs |
| WholesaleBackup | US$30/month console + US$3/device (US$2.40 at 100 devices, US$2.10 at 250, US$1.80 at 500) | Yours |
| MSP360 Managed Backup | Per-workload licensing, bring your own storage; public reviews put entry near US$2.50/workload/month | Yours |
| CrashPlan | US$7.33/user/month endpoints, US$15.75/server/month, US$3.67/user/month for Microsoft 365 | Included |
| Datto | Partner programme, quote only | Appliance + cloud, included |
Layer two is storage, and this is where the restore bill hides.
| Storage | Price | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | US$6.95/TB/month | Egress free up to 3x average stored volume, then US$0.01/GB |
| Wasabi | US$7.99/TB/month, no egress or API fees | 1 TB monthly minimum, 90-day minimum storage duration per object |
| IDrive e2 | US$6/TB/month | 1 TB minimum on pay-as-you-go |
| Amazon S3 | Around US$23/TB/month plus retrieval | Egress about US$0.09/GB after the first 100 GB/month |
Run the maths on one restore and the choice stops being academic. A 500 GB restore costs roughly nothing on B2, Wasabi or IDrive e2 and about US$36 on S3. At 2 TB the spread reaches US$175. Charge the same monthly fee either way and your storage choice decides whether that client is profitable.
What you charge
Industry pricing guides put platform costs at US$2-25 per endpoint per month, with US$3-15/device/month as the typical vendor band, and per-GB platforms at US$0.10-0.50/GB/month.
Service providers then charge US$12-20 per workstation per month, up to about US$20 in regulated verticals. Servers are a different bracket: roughly US$75-150 per server per month for a base tier and US$150-300 for a premium tier with shorter recovery commitments, immutable copies and compliance reporting. NovaBACKUP's published MSP pricing guidance also draws a hard line: do not price below US$10 per endpoint, because support and testing labour eats the margin within months.
For context in the sales meeting: the average cyberattack costs a small business around US$254,000 once recovery, downtime and reputational damage are counted. A US$300-500 monthly backup bill disappears next to that number - but only if the client hears it before the incident.
Margins at a realistic scale
Assuming a bring-your-own-storage stack at roughly US$3-5 all-in cost per endpoint per month including storage:
| Endpoints @ US$15 | Client revenue | Platform + storage | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | US$375/month | ~US$117/month | ~69% |
| 50 | US$750/month | ~US$216/month | ~71% |
| 100 | US$1,500/month | ~US$339/month | ~77% |
Read that table twice, because it does not include your own time. At 25 endpoints this is side income. At 100-150 endpoints, with monitoring and quarterly restore testing systematised, it is a business. Per-GB pricing earns more in absolute terms at the same client count, but revenue swings monthly as client data grows - which is why most providers keep per-device pricing as the floor and per-GB as upside.
The launch path, compressed
- Choose the customer before the software. One segment you can reach cheaply - local accountants, clinics, retail chains with 3-10 stores - so the configuration, proposal and case study are reusable.
- Decide all-inclusive or bring-your-own-storage. All-inclusive (CrashPlan, Datto) starts fastest with least control. BYOS (Comet, MSP360, WholesaleBackup) scales better. Common hybrid: all-inclusive for the first ten small clients, migrate heavy clients to BYOS once the storage line becomes visible.
- Build a two-machine lab. One Windows workstation, one Linux server. Run a full backup, a bare-metal restore and a file-level restore before you quote anyone. Every platform listed above has a free trial. You cannot sell a restore you have never performed.
- Design the service, not just the backup. The 3-2-1 baseline plus: a retention policy agreed in writing (daily 30 days, monthly 12 months, yearly 3-7 years for compliance clients), object lock or immutability on at least one copy so ransomware cannot encrypt the backups too, encryption in transit and at rest, a monthly job report, a quarterly documented restore test, and alerting that reaches a human. A backup failing silently for three weeks is worse than no backup.
- Price from a cost baseline, never from a guess. Platform cost per endpoint + storage per GB + your management time + restore-testing time, then a 50-70% gross margin. All-in cost of US$5 per endpoint becomes a US$12-15 price. Set a minimum monthly invoice (US$100-150 is common) so a two-endpoint client is still worth onboarding.
- Put the legal paperwork in place. Service agreement, data processing agreement, written retention and deletion policy. If you serve EU clients you are a processor under GDPR. In Vietnam, the Law on Personal Data Protection 91/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 January 2026 with Decree 356/2025/ND-CP guiding it - backups holding personal data must follow those safeguards and consent rules.
- Sell an audit, not a pitch. Three questions: what would you lose if this server died today, when did you last test a restore, and who restores a file someone deleted 60 days ago? Free backup health checks convert far better than a price list, and they work remotely.
- Report even when everything is green. Monthly job report, restore-test result, quarterly review flagging what has grown. Backup clients leave because of silence, not price.
Seven mistakes that kill new providers
- Never testing a restore. A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis. Test quarterly and document it - that document doubles as your best sales asset.
- Ignoring egress and restore fees. Choose storage with free or generous egress, or price restores explicitly in the contract.
- One storage destination. A single provider account is one point of failure and one ransomware target if credentials are reused.
- Pricing below US$10 per endpoint. Support, monitoring and restore testing are real labour.
- Forgetting Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Half the data your clients care about is not on a server you can see.
- No written retention policy. "We keep everything forever" is a storage bill with no ceiling and a compliance problem.
- Going silent after onboarding. Report monthly. Silence is the number one reason backup clients churn.
Why the timing is decent in Vietnam and Southeast Asia
Vietnamese SMEs are digitising quickly - e-invoices, online sales, cloud accounting - and most have never bought a professional backup service. Three things line up: personal-data regulation now pushes businesses to document how they protect customer data, ransomware is increasingly aimed at firms too small to have tested backups, and object storage at US$6-8 per TB per month keeps the infrastructure line small. Local pricing tends to sit below US rates: US$8-15 per endpoint per month for workstations and US$40-100 per server, with Microsoft 365 backup sold separately per user. Compete on response time and documented restore tests, not on being the cheapest.
For the software layer, AOMEI Backupper is the licence most people start with - one-time pricing, image backup and bootable rescue media, which is exactly what a lab needs when a client machine refuses to boot. For the storage layer, pCloud is worth pricing because of its lifetime plans and client-side encryption, useful when a customer insists backups sit outside a single provider's cloud.
The full guide - the eight steps expanded, the three-line quote template clients actually sign, and the numbers behind every figure here - is on Tân IT365: How to Start a Data Backup Business in 2026.
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