Fileslinger has a great and thorough review of Clouberry Online Backup…which is not actually an online backup service.  It is a slick and well designed client that helps the end user do their backups…and the destination is the Amazon S3 storage cloud.  So, you buy this software, and then you also pay the (rather small) fees to Amazon for storage.  Check out the article, it is well written and quite useful, as usual.

I do wonder sometimes about the business model in situations like this.  I would personally lean towards distributing the software for free and wrapping the S3 service into monthly billing…it may have some more issues in terms of collection, but recurring income is better than 1 time income.

At $30 a pop, if you sold 100 licenses you’d bring in $3000.
If you were able to up charge the S3 service by about $1 a month, the same 100 customers would net $100 a month.  But, over 3 years, you’d bring in $3600…and possibly much more if their data requirements expanded over time.  Free downloads also remove the initial obstacle of purchasing software.  This is the model Vembu is following for their @home service.  This is NOT the model that Mozy or Carbonite follow….their models make almost no long-term sense, given that unlimited use generally means that costs will get bigger while revenue stays flat…so i guess they hope to make a lot of profit early on?

All that said, the Cloudberry Online Backup software does look really solid, and they have other offerings that also make use (and sense) of the sometimes confusing S3 interface.