In India, backing up a ₹145 mailbox costs as much as the mailbox itself

01Three of the four layers ship inside the suite

Start with what the licence already holds. Exchange Online Protection, the baseline spam and malware filter, is in every Microsoft 365 plan. Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, which adds Safe Links, Safe Attachments and anti-phishing, is in Business Premium and, from 1 July 2026, in E3; Plan 2 is in E5.³ Gmail filters spam, phishing and malware in every Workspace edition.³

That does not make a third-party filter pointless; it moves it down the list and changes what it is for. The guide’s reading is that neither native filter goes deep on behavioural detection of business email compromise, the message with no link, no attachment and no malware that asks the accounts team to change a supplier’s bank details, or on scanning the collaboration apps that now carry files.³ A filter bought in 2026 is bought for that gap, and it increasingly sits behind the native one through an API rather than in front of it as a gateway. A team that has not switched on the Defender policies it already pays for has no business evaluating one.

Archiving is the layer most buyers pay for twice. Microsoft’s own service description says Business Premium, E3 and E5 “already include archiving and don’t require Exchange Online Archiving as an add-on”; Business Basic and Business Standard need the add-on. The archive starts at 100 GB and auto-expands to 1.5 TB, with litigation hold.¹ On Google, Vault, the retention and eDiscovery tool, arrives with Business Plus.⁶

Management, the second of our 2024 layers, sorts differently. Rules, folders and shared mailboxes come with the mailbox; what a support or sales team buys is a seat in a shared-inbox or help-desk tool, priced per agent rather than per mailbox. We costed that seat separately in our piece on team email, so it is left out of the arithmetic below.

02Archiving keeps mail; it does not bring it back

An archive and a retention policy stop content from being destroyed before a date, so it can be searched and exported when a regulator or a court asks. They do not restore a mailbox an administrator purged, a tenant an attacker reconfigured, or last Tuesday’s state of a folder. Google says in its own FAQ that Vault is not a backup, and Microsoft recommends third-party backup.⁴

Without hold or a retention policy, the window is short. A deleted item sits in Exchange Online’s Recoverable Items folder for 14 days by default, which an administrator can raise to 30; after that “the item is removed from Exchange Online”.²

Microsoft 365 Backup is real backup, restorable in place, but it is metered by the gigabyte and stays inside the same tenant. At the six gigabytes a user that Cohesity documents as an average, it is about US$0.90 a user a month; a 50 GB mailbox costs US$7.50.⁴ The third-party products below price per user, keep the copy outside the tenant, and most include the storage.

The failures a backup exists for are the ones the archive does not see coming. An administrator account is compromised and the attacker removes mailboxes and policies; a leaver’s mailbox is deleted with the licence; a sync client encrypts files that were also attached to mail. TechBag’s guide records the ways a backup purchase goes wrong in practice: Teams private chats not captured because the export interface was never enabled, Entra ID left out because the directory is a separate product, and a restore that turns out to be an export file plus a support ticket.⁴ A trial should restore one mailbox and one SharePoint site in place before anyone signs.

03The missing layer costs as much as the mailbox

Microsoft prices Business Basic for India at ₹145 a user a month on annual commitment, which TechBag’s intel page puts at about US$1.74; Google Workspace Business Starter is ₹270, about US$3.25.⁵⁶ Backup vendors print US dollars. Of the eleven vendors in TechBag’s SaaS backup guide, seven publish or have a reported per-user Microsoft 365 price, and every one of them lands between US$1.67 and US$3.80 a user a month; the chart shows five, with Druva (about US$3) and AvePoint (US$2 to US$3.50, indicative) inside the same band.⁴

Two readings follow. For a Business Basic tenant whose mail is the company’s record, Business Premium at ₹1,560 may be the cheaper way to the first three layers, because it brings archiving and Defender Plan 1 together with device management.⁵¹ And for any tier, backup is a separate line that has to be budgeted on its own. The cheapest published price is not always the cheapest bill: check whether storage, Entra ID and the seats of people who have left are inside the per-user figure.⁴

A Google Workspace buyer has fewer choices. The guide’s Google shortlist names three products, Druva, AvePoint and Acronis; Veeam, Commvault, Barracuda and Rubrik do not offer Google Workspace at all.⁴ The price band is similar, but the cheapest published Microsoft lists in the chart are not available to a Gmail tenant, and a company running both suites should price one console that covers both before buying two.