Every trial customer asks this in the first week. Should I use macup Cloud, the managed option, or bring my own S3-compatible bucket? And the answer we give inside sales calls is not the answer that shows up on most vendor websites.
Here’s the framework, minus the sales-deck version.
macup Cloud: what you’re paying for
macup Cloud is managed object storage that we operate end-to-end. When you send your backups there, you get:
- A single, predictable bill. One line item, tied to your plan tier.
- No egress fees, ever. Restores are free, including full-archive restores and disaster-recovery restores that would cost you four figures at a hyperscaler.
- Object Lock in compliance mode, on by default, not optional. Once a snapshot is written, it cannot be deleted or modified before its retention expires, not even by us. Ransomware that gets your laptop cannot reach back and delete your history.
- No IAM juggling, no bucket policies, no region picking, no quota dashboards. You don’t think about any of it.
Tiers are keyed to capacity. Every tier includes multiple Macs under one account, so a household or a small studio isn’t paying seat-by-seat to back up the family’s work.
You pay slightly more per terabyte than you would renting raw object storage from a commodity provider. In exchange you get a system that doesn’t need an operations team to run.
BYOS: what you get
BYOS (“bring your own storage”) is the other side of the trade. macup talks to any S3-compatible bucket you already have: AWS S3, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, a self-hosted MinIO cluster in your office, whatever.
macup handles the hard parts: client-side encryption, content-defined chunking, deduplication, snapshot format, retention policy, integrity checking. Your provider handles the cheap parts: keeping bytes on disks, billing you for them, and collecting egress fees when you restore.
The macup engine itself is flat-priced: $5 per month per device, regardless of how much data that device sends to its bucket. A 30 TB archive costs $5 per month on the macup side. Your storage provider charges separately at their rate card.
That pricing model exists because BYOS customers already have a cost conversation with their storage provider. We don’t need to be in the middle of it.
When macup Cloud wins
- You don’t already have a cloud storage contract, and you don’t want one.
- You’re a multi-Mac household or a small studio and you want a single bill.
- You need immutable retention and you don’t want to set up Object Lock yourself, confirm you’ve configured compliance mode and not governance mode, and write a runbook explaining the difference to your accountant.
- You are the accountant, and you want a predictable line item on the P&L.
- You’ve looked at the egress pricing on a major cloud and decided you do not want to discover, during a 4 TB disaster restore, what “standard egress” actually costs.
- You want set-it-and-stop-thinking-about-it. Most of our customers do. There’s no shame in it.
When BYOS wins
- You already have a bucket inside an existing enterprise account, and reusing it keeps you inside a compliance framework you’ve already paid a lawyer to bless.
- Your archive is big enough that your storage provider’s rate card, integrated over a year, comes in cheaper than our tier pricing. This is a real case for customers with dozens of terabytes of dormant data.
- You have hard data residency requirements and need to pin storage to a specific provider-owned region that we don’t offer.
- You’re running self-hosted. A MinIO cluster on a NAS in your office, on-prem for everything, zero external providers in the data path. macup works fine against it.
- You have a genuine reason to negotiate storage economics yourself, and the operational overhead is either free to you (because your IT team is already doing it) or genuinely cheaper than paying us to do it.
When both at once wins
A surprising number of customers run both, and it’s often the right answer.
The common patterns:
- macup Cloud as primary, an external SSD set as secondary. The SSD is for fast local restores of a single file or folder without waiting for a cloud round trip. macup Cloud is what actually saves you when the SSD dies.
- macup Cloud as primary, a BYOS bucket in a different region as secondary, for customers who want belt-and-braces cloud redundancy across two independent providers. Two separate failure domains.
- BYOS as primary (because of an existing compliance requirement), macup Cloud as secondary (because you still want Object Lock compliance mode somewhere without having to configure it yourself).
Multi-destination backup sets are free to configure inside macup. Every additional destination costs you whatever its storage costs; it doesn’t cost you an extra macup engine seat.
The math
The argument for macup Cloud versus BYOS at any specific scale is, in the end, arithmetic.
We publish the numbers. Plug your device count and your projected storage in at the cost calculator. It shows both tiers simultaneously, including projected egress on the BYOS side if you were to do a full restore. The URL encodes your inputs, so you can send the result to a partner, a bookkeeper, or a CFO without retyping anything.
If the calculator says macup Cloud, use macup Cloud. If it says BYOS, use BYOS. If it says “within 10%, either,” pick whichever makes you think less on a Tuesday morning.
The one wrong answer
There is one wrong answer, and it’s the one a surprising number of customers reach for before we talk them out of it: picking no destination at all. Running macup without a backup target is not a configuration we support, because it isn’t backup. It’s a progress bar with nowhere to send bytes.
The wrong-er version is picking only a local external drive and calling that your strategy. A drive is a tier. It is not a strategy. Drives die. Drives get stolen. Drives ride in the same bag as the Mac they’re backing up and fall off the same bike in the same rainstorm. A second drive in a different room is better than one drive. A drive plus a cloud is better still. A drive plus two clouds is what customers with hard-won opinions about data loss tend to run.
Closing
We don’t actually care which one you pick. We care that you pick one, that you turn it on, and that you verify a restore before Friday.
If you already know the answer, go to macup Cloud or BYOS and start a trial. If you don’t, the calculator is the shortest way to find out.