Microsoft charges roughly US$0.20 per gigabyte per month for extra SharePoint Online storage, which lands somewhere around AUD $0.32 once it reaches an Australian invoice. Object storage costs about $16 a terabyte a month. And in most tenants, a good share of what's taking up the expensive kind is files nobody has opened in years.
We built ArchiveBridge because of those three facts. It's Cloud Ready Solutions' own product, built and supported in Australia, and it does one thing: it finds the cold files in a SharePoint tenant, moves them into cheaper storage that you own, and leaves behind a one-click way to bring any of them back.
Why the storage bill keeps growing
SharePoint Online is collaboration software and it's priced like collaboration software. Version history, co-authoring, permissions, search. All of that earns its keep while a file is being worked on, and none of it does anything for a project folder that closed three years ago.
Old files still have to be kept, though. Compliance, contract terms, or the sensible fear of deleting something that later turns out to matter. So they accumulate. There's no natural point at which anyone goes back through a tenant and clears it out, which means storage grows until the admin centre starts warning about the tenant limit, and the standard response to the warning is to buy the SharePoint storage add-on. That deals with the warning without changing anything underneath it. The files are still there, the meter is still running, and the same warning comes back later.
What ArchiveBridge does
The sequence is fixed. ArchiveBridge downloads a cold file from SharePoint, calculates its SHA-256 hash, uploads it to an object storage bucket, then compares the hash of the stored copy against the original. If they match, the SharePoint original is deleted and a restore stub is left at its exact path. If they don't match, nothing is deleted. The file stays in SharePoint and gets flagged.
The stub is the part users actually touch. Click it, and ArchiveBridge pulls the file back from the bucket, verifies the hash again and re-uploads it to where it came from. No ticket, no admin involvement. The platform also snapshots each file's permissions at archive time, so a restored file comes back with the sharing it had when it left.
Restore time depends on file size and the storage back-end, so there's no single figure worth quoting. It is a per-file operation, though, which is the main practical difference from Microsoft 365 Archive, Microsoft's own cold tier. That product archives whole sites, keeps billing monthly inside Microsoft's pricing, and reactivating a site involves a rehydration wait plus a per-GB fee. We've written a detailed comparison if you're weighing the two.
The numbers
Everything in this section is indicative. The real figure for your tenant comes from the free scan described below.
At the add-on rate, a terabyte of cold data costs about $328 a month. The same terabyte in Wasabi's Sydney or Melbourne region, at CRS pricing, is about $16. Run that over three years and one terabyte is roughly $11,800 against $576. Five terabytes, $59,000 against $2,880. At ten terabytes the SharePoint side passes $118,000 while the object storage side still hasn't reached $6,000.
The right-hand numbers are storage cost only. ArchiveBridge charges a management fee on top, priced per terabyte archived and quoted off your scan results, so the true gap is narrower than the raw storage comparison suggests. It's still a wide gap. Microsoft's add-on rate is doing most of the work in that table.
Where the files go
You bring the bucket. Your keys, your region, your storage account. ArchiveBridge charges for the management layer and never marks up or resells the storage underneath it.
The default recommendation is Wasabi, which has Sydney and Melbourne regions and no egress fees. Egress matters here, since the whole point of a restore is pulling data back out. The platform is S3-compatible, so AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2 and MinIO also work.
Residency follows the bucket. A Sydney bucket keeps archived files onshore. A US-region bucket puts them in the United States. If you have sovereignty obligations, that's a choice to make deliberately rather than by default.
There's a real trade here too. A file moved out of SharePoint sits outside Microsoft's compliance boundary, in a bucket you're now responsible for securing. The guardrails exist for exactly this reason. Files under Purview retention labels, litigation holds or eDiscovery holds are detected and excluded automatically. Checked-out files, files with unique permissions and files under retention locks are routed to a manual review queue rather than processed. Every action the platform takes, whether that's a scan, a copy, a verification, a delete, a stub or a skip, is written to an append-only audit log that can be exported and can't be edited.
It keeps running
Most archiving projects are one-off clean-ups. Quota drops, everyone moves on, and eighteen months later the tenant is back where it started.
ArchiveBridge re-scans on a schedule instead. You define what cold means once, by age since last modified, minimum size, extension and path, and newly qualifying files get picked up on each pass. Checked-out and retention-locked files are skipped without anyone having to remember them.
For MSPs managing this across clients
The platform is multi-tenant, with an account tree running from distributor through MSP to end customer and billing that rolls up the tree. Branding is white-label per client. Margin is set per client in the interface, against what the platform costs you, rather than reconstructed in a spreadsheet at the end of the month.
There are two ways to sell it. Management-only, where the client brings their own bucket. Or all-in, where CRS supplies the Wasabi storage alongside the tool on a single bill and the storage margin stacks on the tool margin. For clients already using UFSConnect or Gladinet CentreStack, restore stubs can point at the portal and drive mapping their staff already have.
ArchiveBridge is in early access. Partner terms, deal registration and white-label scope are all conversations with our team at this stage.
One thing ArchiveBridge doesn't do
ArchiveBridge is not backup. It does nothing about ransomware, account compromise or a user deleting the wrong thing, and it isn't meant to. Keepit covers that side for Microsoft 365, with proper backup of the data your people work in every day. ArchiveBridge only deals with the storage bill for the old stuff. Plenty of organisations need both.
The free scan
The first step is free and read-only. You grant a Microsoft Entra consent that can read your SharePoint estate and do nothing else, and ArchiveBridge reports back your reclaimable gigabytes and what they currently cost. Nothing moves under that consent. Archiving requires a second, separate write consent, and only if you decide to go ahead. There's no sales call attached to the result.
For a rough sense before involving your tenant at all, the SharePoint Savings Calculator takes a slider and returns indicative monthly and annual figures in AUD. The ArchiveBridge vendor page has the full product detail, and there are comparisons against the storage add-on and Vaultastic as well.
Early access is open to Australian MSPs and direct customers now. Pricing is per terabyte archived, with no long contracts. The scan takes a few minutes to set up and comes back with your reclaimable gigabytes and the dollar figure attached to them.