By Cindy Cyr
Datto, a Kaseya company, is increasing their price for the first time in three years for month-to-month customers on their SaaS Protection product. Despite the 13% hike, Datto’s suite of tools still keeps them as the lowest-priced product in the market in terms of value for cost.
The Datto suite includes Datto BCDR, Datto SaaS Protection, Datto Continuity for Microsoft Azure, Datto Cloud Continuity for PC, Datto Workplace, Datto File Protection, and Backupify.
The 13% increase for month-to-month users on Datto SaaS Protection aligns with similar market trends, such as Microsoft 365’s 20% increase in 2022 and Salesforce, which has a built-in 7% annual increase (equivalent to a 21% increase since Datto’s last price adjustment).
Company leaders said the adjustment was necessitated by inflation and changes in the foreign exchange rates affecting their costs, specifically in the additional expenses incurred by month-to-month users.
“Inflation is increasing costs for everyone, including us,” said Brent Torre, General Manager for the Datto Continuity suite, in an interview Tuesday. “We also spend extra time and energy with renewals and on management of month to month customers.”
The adjustment only affects month-to-month users, said Torre, adding that customers can keep their existing rate by moving to Datto’s subscription program, which is a one, two or three-year term. Term customers are also exempt from price hikes for at least three years.
“There’s value in long-term commitment,” Torre said. “If customers want to move to our subscription option, they get value by getting the lowest price option on the market and predictability in price through the end of 2026. And we get value by having some predictability and reducing our costs of managing those month-to-month accounts.”
Datto started communicating with customers in February to give them adequate time to prepare.
“We realize our partners can’t change pricing on a dime,” Torre said. “Our account managers ran a call campaign to let folks know this price change was coming and that they could also make themselves immune to this price change and any other price changes for the next three years.”
The company initially considered following suit in 2022 when Microsoft 365 increased its pricing by 20%.
“We actually talked about increasing our prices so when our customers were having the conversation about Microsoft, they could just roll this in,” Torre said. “But we decided to do the partner-friendly thing and keep prices static for them. But now it’s time. It’s been three years. Inflation has changed quite a lot, and we need to make this adjustment.”
A leader in cloud-to-cloud backup, Datto offers the most comprehensive suite of automated features and is among the largest, if not the largest, on the market in terms of the number of active users being backed up consistently and reliably. Although the platform is already robust enough to handle its large audience, Datto is committed to continued improvement and constantly works with research and development teams at Microsoft and Google to ensure they can secure backups on behalf of their customers.
“We’re continuing to invest in the platform, predictability, and backup success rates,” Torre said. “We continue to invest in expanding the adjacencies we protect in the growing M365 and Azure suites.”
To learn more about Kaseya visit their website HERE.
