backup math for the 10-user clients, where the big vendors quietly lose you
one-man shop here, and the thing that took me way too long to figure out is that the big backup vendors are priced to make your smallest clients unprofitable, kind of on purpose.
a BCDR appliance + per-endpoint on a 10-seat dentist office eats the whole margin. more flexible licensing helps but the mental overhead per tiny client still adds up. so for a couple years I was quietly subsidizing my smallest accounts and calling it "growth."
switched the small-client tier to a managed agent + storage I control: image backups to a Backblaze B2 bucket per client, running MSP360 Managed Backup. storage runs at object-storage rates instead of a per-seat markup, so a 10-user client's offsite backup costs pocket change instead of half the retainer. immutable object lock for the ransomware angle, which the cyber-insurance questionnaires ask about now anyway.
the part that actually matters for a solo shop: it's documented and handover-able. the recovery runbook is a doc plus credentials the client owns, so if I get hit by a bus or want to sell the book someday, whoever takes over isn't locked out of a vendor cloud.
not saying rip out your turnkey stack where it works, appliances are great when a client will happily pay the premium to have one vendor to call when it breaks. but for the sub-15-seat tier this fixed my margin. honest catch: the initial upload drags on a big client, and the discipline of actually test-restoring is on you now, the tool won't nag you into it.
what's everyone else running for the small tier? feels like nobody builds a properly priced product for exactly this segment.