Amazon Inc. has built a multi-billion-dollar cloud empire by enabling organizations to spin up virtual machines through a simple web interface and bill them only for the hardware resources that they use. Now, Druva Inc. wants to replicate the company’s success in the data protection space by adopting a similar on-demand pricing model for its managed backup service.

Starting today, users can keep copies of their data in Druva Phoenix for as little as $0.03 per gigabyte per month, more or less the same amount it would cost to store them on Amazon S3. Druva credits the affordability of the service to its patented deduplication technology, which is able to reduce the size of a file between 50-100 times before it’s backed up. And after a while, a company’s most infrequently-accessed information is automatically moved to a cheaper storage medium in a bid to cut costs even further.

The new pricing model should make Phoenix’s functionality much more accessible to small and midsize businesses while easing payment management for large customers with a lot of files backed up. Having billing tied to usage is especially useful when it comes to expense planning, since an enterprise’s annual backup budget must account for the data growth that will occur during that period. If the approach catches on, which is likely, then at least some of Druva’s many competitors in the cloud backup market can be expected to follow suit and adopt similar pricing schemes further down the line.

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