How cloud disaster recovery tools are priced

Which pricing units do vendors use?

1. Assets. Firefly's Essential tier is priced for up to 20,000 assets. ControlMonkey's free resilience assessment covers up to 50,000 cloud assets.
2. Protected resources. ControlMonkey's Pro tier lists 50,000 protected resources.
3. Core resources. Arpio prices by core resources, which it describes as server-like components such as VMs, databases and file systems: 25 in Standard, 50 in Premium and 100 or more in Enterprise.
4. Terabytes. Veeam publishes its SaaS offering at $42 per TB per month.
5. Consumption. HCP Terraform offers pay-as-you-go with a $500 credit, with per-resource rates in IBM's pricing table.

The unit matters more than the headline number. An estate with many small resources and little data looks cheap on a per-terabyte model and expensive on a per-resource one, and the reverse is also true.

What does each vendor publish?

• Arpio: Standard $12k a year single-cloud or $18k multi-cloud; Premium $36k or $54k; Enterprise custom. Billed annually, no storage charges from Arpio, cloud provider costs apply, 9x5 support included and 24x7 as an add-on.
• Veeam: SaaS at $42 per TB per month; software pricing varies.
• Firefly: a 14-day trial with all capabilities; Essential at $2,499 a month billed annually; Backup and DR in the custom-priced Enterprise tier.
• ControlMonkey: the free assessment is published; Pro and Enterprise are Contact sales.
• StackGuardian: a free tier with no credit card; enterprise plans are Contact sales.
• Commvault Cloud Rewind: Contact sales, with listings on the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces.
• Cohesity: Contact sales.

Which tier holds the recovery capability?

This is the question buyers most often miss. A published entry price is only useful if the recovery features sit in that tier. Firefly publishes Essential, but its Backup and DR capability is in Enterprise. ControlMonkey's free assessment includes detection-only drift; snapshot changes and secondary region replication are in Pro. Arpio includes one-click failover testing in every tier, adds automated failback in Premium and orchestrated ransomware recovery in Enterprise.

What costs sit outside the vendor's price?

A recovery environment runs in your own cloud accounts, so the cloud provider bills for it. Arpio states this directly. Warm standby and pilot light strategies keep infrastructure running in a second region all the time, which adds cloud cost even when nothing fails.

What should you take from this lesson?

Ask every vendor the same four questions: the pricing unit, the tier that contains recovery, the cloud costs a recovery environment adds, and what the trial or assessment includes. The calculator models the published prices against your own inputs.