Own licence cost after the Salesforce acquisition

Plenty of buyers still search for OwnBackup, and plenty of renewal emails still say Own, so the first job in any licence conversation is to establish which product is actually on the paper. Salesforce's own words on the deal are short: "Salesforce completed its acquisition of Own Company on November 18, 2024." The product most people mean when they say Own is now sold as Salesforce Backup & Recover. This guide is about the licence, meaning what you pay each term for the right to back up and restore your data. The project that sets it up is a separate cost, covered on the Own implementation cost page.

#What you are buying now

Salesforce's Own integration page says Own Recover is now Salesforce Backup & Recover, and the Backup & Recover product page calls it "formerly Own Recover". That product takes automated daily backups, lets you back up on demand before a deployment or a mass update, and restores a chosen slice of data without overwriting records created since. It is the centre of the licence.

Around it sits a family of products that used to be Own's wider suite, and a quote may name any of them. Archive moves inactive records out of the org to reduce data storage spend. Data Mask and Seed protects sensitive data in sandboxes and fills them with realistic test data. Salesforce's page also says Own Secure is now integrated into its Shield security products. Backup & Recover for ServiceNow and Backup & Recover for Microsoft Dynamics cover those systems. Finally there is Backup & Recover Next, which Salesforce describes as a native Salesforce solution that is FedRAMP High compliant and available in select regions.

That is already a naming trap. Salesforce's release notes also carry an entry titled "Backup and Restore Is Now Salesforce Backup", so a quote line that says only "backup" leaves room for the wrong product to be assumed. Ask for the product name exactly as it will appear on the order form, and ask whether it is the Own-derived Backup & Recover or Backup & Recover Next. They are not interchangeable on region, architecture or price.

#Is there a list price?

No. Salesforce's FAQ answers the cost question in one sentence: "Pricing varies based on each customer's individual needs." The same answer says the sales team will tailor a package to your requirements and price considerations, whatever the size of the company or industry. That is a plain statement that this is a quote-only product.

You will find review sites and blogs that publish starting figures for Own or Backup & Recover. Treat them with caution. They are not Salesforce documents, they rarely say which edition or term the figure applied to, and they predate the acquisition and any repackaging since. Use them, at most, to check that a quote is in a believable region, never as a benchmark you cite back at Salesforce.

Because the formula is unpublished, the useful move is to find out which inputs your quote is built on. The product page gives you the vocabulary. It says you can "Configure backups for any number of production orgs or sandboxes, regardless of their size or complexity." So the product is built to cover any number of orgs, but the quote still has to say whether your price rises with the count, with data volume, with records, or with a bundle of all three. Retention is the next lever, since the default is generous: "By default, we include 99 years of retention but offer you the flexibility to tailor daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backup retention by org." If your real obligation is seven years of history, ask whether a shorter retention policy changes the price or only changes the storage you consume.

#What is included and what is separate

The cleanest way to read a Backup & Recover quote is to split it into lines and ask of each one whether it is core, an add-on or a different product. The table below uses Salesforce's own descriptions of each piece.

The row most buyers underestimate is the second one. Salesforce is explicit that "Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is a separate add-on capability to Salesforce Backup & Recover." Daily backups are a snapshot at an interval, which is fine for most objects and wrong for a few. If a table such as orders, claims or cases changes thousands of times a day, a snapshot taken at two in the morning does not protect the afternoon. Decide which objects deserve continuous capture before the first quote, so the add-on is priced for those and not bolted on after the first scare.

#Contract and renewal mechanics

Salesforce has not published a term, a notice period or an uplift for this product, so everything here is a question for the order form rather than a fact about it. The questions are worth asking in writing.

First, the paper itself. The acquisition completed on 18 November 2024, so an Own agreement signed before then may still be on Own Company terms. Ask whether your next renewal moves you to Salesforce paper, and if it does, ask what changes in the data processing terms, the sub-processor list and the support model. A backup tool holds a copy of everything you own, so those terms matter more than they would for a reporting add-on.

Second, the rename. A product that changes name at renewal can lose the discount that was negotiated against the old SKU. Ask for the previous unit pricing to be carried across in writing, and for any change in the unit of measure to be shown side by side.

Third, growth. Ask what happens to the price when data volume or the number of orgs increases mid-term. The answer should be a stated rate or a stated process. "We will review it at renewal" is also an answer, but it is a different risk from a metered overage, and you should know which one you have.

Fourth, the way out. Salesforce says you can export backup data to CSV, a SQL file or a MySQL endpoint, manually or through APIs. That limits lock-in, because your history is portable, but it does not make leaving free. Ask how long export access lasts after the term ends.

Fifth, the product roadmap. Salesforce is positioning Backup & Recover Next as the native option, which raises an honest question for anyone signing a multi-year term on the current product: what happens if you want to move to Next in year two? Ask whether the term can be converted, whether data already backed up carries over, and whether the price per unit stays the same. If the answer is vague, prefer a shorter term or a clause that lets you switch without a penalty.

#How to size the licence

Start with an inventory, not a number. List every production org and every sandbox, and mark which sandboxes hold production-grade data. A full sandbox is a copy of production and may deserve protection. A developer sandbox rebuilt every sprint usually does not. The product page says you can configure backups for sandboxes as well as production, which is useful and is also the easiest way to inflate a licence by backing up environments nobody would miss.

Next, rank objects by how painful loss would be and how fast they change. That ranking decides the backup frequency, the candidates for Continuous Data Protection, and the objects you can exclude. Salesforce says the policies let you exclude data you do not need to preserve and manage API consumption by backup, so exclusion is a legitimate way to trim volume. Work out too whether Archive should come first. Records that are inactive and still sitting in the org cost you data storage and are also copied into every backup. Archiving them may shrink both bills, though only your own numbers can say by how much.

Then fix the retention rule from your legal and audit requirements, not from the default. Finally, run a restore drill in a sandbox against a representative object with its children. A licence is only right-sized if the restore works inside the time your business can tolerate. If it takes a day and you need an hour, the answer may be a different tier or a different tool, not a bigger version of the same one.

#Three buyers, three different quotes

A licence conversation is easier when you know which kind of buyer you are, because the inputs that move the price differ.

The first is a mid-sized business with one production org, a full sandbox and a couple of developer sandboxes. Its quote is likely to be driven by data volume and retention rather than by org count. The sensible ask is a single production line, the full sandbox as an option rather than a default, and a retention period that matches the audit requirement rather than the maximum. Continuous Data Protection is worth pricing only for the two or three objects that change all day.

The second is a group with an org per business unit, perhaps after an acquisition of its own. Here the number of orgs is the headline, and so is governance, since a central console that manages backups for many orgs is useful only if the licence lets you add an org without a renegotiation. Ask whether a new org can be added mid-term at the rate in the order form, and whether a retired org stops costing you straight away.

The third is a business whose org is large and heavily written to, such as a service operation with millions of cases and attachments. Volume dominates, and so does the argument for Archive. If most of the volume is inactive, archiving first can reduce what you back up, which is why the two products are usually discussed together. Ask for the quote with and without Archive so you can see the interaction.

In all three cases the discipline is the same. Write down the numbers that describe your estate before you talk to Salesforce, and ask the account team to show which of those numbers appear in their pricing. A quote that cannot be traced back to anything you told them is a quote you cannot defend at renewal.

#How to compare two offers

You will probably hold at least two quotes, whether that is Salesforce's own plus another vendor, or Backup & Recover beside Backup & Recover Next. Compare them on the same grid. Price alone is a poor comparison, because two quotes can differ in what they meter and what they exclude.

Do not forget the free option as a baseline. Salesforce's built-in data export produces files on a schedule, which is useful as a last resort and does not give you a guided restore that preserves relationships. A paid tool earns its fee in the hour after an incident, so weigh each offer by how that hour would go.

#Where the other questions sit

The services side, meaning the objects, the policies and the restore drill, sits on the Own backup page. The history of the deal belongs on what happened to Own. How a restore must be kept from overwriting a live org belongs on integrating Own with Salesforce, and the question of whether to move to another tool belongs on should I migrate from Own.