Why managed backup is included, not billed separately

Managed backup is not a second product. There is no backup subscription, no backup tier and no backup line on the invoice. It comes with device sync, and the only thing we meter is the space your snapshots occupy, at the same flat rate as everything else we store for you: $0.05 per GB per month.

Two things that always travel together

Every ModelBrain device that syncs already talks to a server we run, over a connection that's authenticated, encrypted, and billed per node. Managed backup needs exactly the same things: a server, an authenticated connection, somewhere to put the bytes. Selling it as a second product would mean a customer reading a second price, deciding whether they wanted it, and watching a second subscription on their statement, for a feature that piggybacks entirely on infrastructure the first one already paid for. So there is no second product.

What "included" actually means

Pay for device sync ($6/node/mo billed annually, $8 monthly, $4/node past 25) and managed backup comes with it: the scheduler, the encrypted upload, the retention, the one-command restore to a new machine. What you pay for beyond that is storage, and only storage, at $0.05 per GB per month, metered on what is actually held at the end of the month. The same is true on the team tier: the per-node fee that adds single sign-on and an audit trail also includes backup for the shared vault, and the vault itself is stored at the same rate.

Why one storage rate instead of a backup fee

An earlier version of this page argued for a flat backup fee with a cap, on the grounds that real vaults are small and a flat price is simple. It was simple, but it was also the wrong shape: a cap is a number you have to remember, and a flat fee overcharges exactly the people it is supposed to be cheap for. A single per-gigabyte rate that applies to every byte we hold, backup snapshot or server-side vault, has neither problem. A typical brain is a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes, so for most people this is cents. If yours is fifty gigabytes, it is $2.50, and you can see why on the statement.

What stays constant either way

Backup is still encrypted on your machine before it's sent, so we hold a copy we can't read, regardless of how it's billed. It's still per node, not per person, same as device sync itself. And storage on your own computer is never metered, because we never see it.