The real cost of SharePoint storage

Ask an IT manager where their Microsoft 365 storage budget goes and you will usually get a shrug. The bill grows, the tenant fills up, and nobody has time to work out why. When you actually break it down, the answer is almost always the same: cold data.

How SharePoint storage is priced

Every Microsoft 365 tenant gets a pooled SharePoint entitlement — roughly 1 TB plus 10 GB per licensed user. Go over it, and Microsoft bills additional storage at a premium per-GB monthly rate. That overage is the line that quietly climbs.

The uncomfortable part: in most tenants, 60–80% of stored data is cold — files that have not been opened in a year, old project sites, finished contracts, archived departments. It is not doing any work. It is just sitting in your most expensive tier.

The math that matters

Say you have 250 users and 12 TB of data. Your entitlement is about 3.5 TB, so you are paying overage on roughly 8.5 TB. If 70% of your data is cold, that is nearly 8.4 TB you could move somewhere far cheaper — while keeping every file one click from restore.

Sovereign object storage costs a fraction of SharePoint overage — on the order of 25–30× less per terabyte — and, critically, has no egress fees, so retrieving your data never costs extra.

Cold does not mean gone

The reason teams do not do this today is fear of breaking access. That is the trick CloudOnBox solves: when a file is archived, it leaves behind a clickable stub in SharePoint that keeps its name, metadata and permissions. Users still find it exactly where they expect; a click brings it back. You cut the bill without cutting access.

Curious what it would save you? Try the savings calculator — it runs entirely in your browser.