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License management

You activate and manage your Afi service subscription at the Afi Portal on the Licensing → Subscription tab. To subscribe to the Afi service, please create an Afi account and add your first tenant:

Once your Afi account is created, you will have a 14-day trial period to evaluate the service. During the trial, Afi provides a fully functional service with all advanced product features and capabilities available for testing. If you do not subscribe to the service by the end of the trial, your account will be automatically suspended, and all backup data will be deleted within 10 days after the trial expiration.

Afi licensing model

Supported providers

Google Workspace & Microsoft 365

Afi requires a user license for each active protected user in a tenant (a Google Workspace or a Microsoft 365 domain), with each license granting a certain amount of backup storage space (as indicated in the Order Form).

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An active protected user is a resource of type User in a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant that is available for backup and is assigned a backup SLA policy. A user present on the Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace side is considered active in the following cases:

  • For Google Workspace - any user which is not suspended or archived
  • For Microsoft 365 - any user which has an active Exchange or SharePoint license

All other resource types (Shared drives, Shared/Room mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Groups/Teams, Entra ID, Power Platform) don't require individual user licenses, but backup storage they occupy contributes to the total backup storage usage for a tenant and should be licensed.

If the total backup storage used by a tenant exceeds the amount provided by the user licenses, additional backup storage should be purchased to cover the total usage.

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Afi doesn't require to protect all resources in a tenant. You can protect any number of resources of any type.

For example, you might choose to protect all Shared drives or all SharePoint sites in a tenant without protecting any users. In this case, you won't need Afi backup user licenses and will only need to purchase enough backup storage.

Microsoft Azure

Afi requires a virtual machine license for each active protected virtual machine in a tenant, with each license granting a certain amount of backup storage space (as indicated in the Order Form).

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A virtual machine is considered active, for licensing purposes, if it exists on the Azure side (regardless of whether it is running or shut down).

If the total backup storage used by a tenant exceeds the amount provided by the virtual machine licenses, additional backup storage should be purchased to cover the total usage.

Kubernetes

Afi Kubernetes Backup is licensed based on a number of nodes in a cluster and backup storage. Please contact Afi Sales team (sales@afi.ai) to request a quote for your project.

Archived and not protected resources

Afi marks a resource as archived if it is deleted on the provider side or is no longer available for backup (eg., users that are suspended in case of Google Workspace, or doesn't have any active Exchange or SharePoint license in case of Microsoft 365). Such resources don't require an individual license even if they have a backup SLA policy assigned.

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The Afi service continues to run backup tasks for Archived resources protected with a backup SLA policy to apply data retention/archiving rules as well as perform data indexing and optimization activities, but won't attempt to download new data from Google/Microsoft.

When a backup SLA policy is removed from a resource, the Afi service continues to preserve its backup indefinitely. That resource can be protected again later, in which case the service will resume backing it up while preserving the existing backup history, or it can be deleted by an Afi account administrator as described in the following article.

The backup storage occupied by Archived resources and resources not protected with a backup SLA policy counts toward the total backup storage usage for a tenant.

Subscribe to the Afi service

Go to the Licensing → Subscriptions tab in the Afi portal and click Subscribe on the subscription details screen:

To ensure that the Afi subscription is configured correctly, please do the following:

a. Select the number of resource (user, virtual machine) licenses and the amount of additional backup storage you want to subscribe to.

Please note that Afi requires a user license for each active protected user in your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant. If you need to reduce the number of user licenses compared to the amount suggested by the service, select the corresponding tenant and adjust the SLA assignments (protected users) accordingly.

b. Click the Subscribe button to activate your subscription. If this is your first Afi subscription and you haven't yet selected a payment method or filled your billing information yet, you will be prompted to link a credit card to your Afi account and enter your organization’s billing details.

If automatic license count adjustment is enabled for a subscription, Afi will automatically adjust the license counts based on service usage. You can also configure upper thresholds for each license type in the auto-licensing settings, or disable it and manage licenses manually.

Once an Afi subscription is activated, you can update the licenses at any time on the Licensing → Subscriptions tab by adjusting the license counts and saving the form. Upon updating the subscription, Afi will highlight the license count changes and show an estimated monthly or annual price for the new license counts.

When license counts are changed in the middle of the billing period, the Afi service will account for these changes in the next service invoice(s) decreasing or increasing the next invoice(s) amount accordingly. The corresponding proration is time-based and calculated based on the remaining duration of the current billing period and the amount of licenses added/removed.

Payment options

You can switch between credit card and manual invoice payment options (ACH/wire transfer) on the Licensing → Payment options tab.

If you select a credit card as a payment method, the Afi billing system will charge the card linked to your account immediately once an invoice is issued. When a card payment fails (for example, when the card is expired or doesn't have enough funds), the service sends a notification to the organization's billing contact as well as to the configured Licensing notifications recipients. Failed credit card payments are retried by the service automatically.

In the case of manual invoice payments, you will receive email invoices with payment instructions and will be able to pay them either manually with a credit card or with a wire/ACH transfer. You can review your Afi invoices, including unpaid ones, and their statuses on the Licensing → Invoices tab.

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Afi service invoices and receipts are sent to your Afi organization's billing contact both in case of automatic and manual payments. The billing contact can be set up and updated on the Licensing → Billing info tab.

Invoices and payments

You can view invoices issued by the Afi service, together with their statuses and detailed PDF/CSV reports, on the Licensing → Invoices tab in the Afi portal:

Licensing notifications

Afi sends licensing, payment, and quota-related notification emails to the Licensing notifications recipients available for configuration on the Configuration → Notifications tab. By default, an Afi organization administrator is added in this group upon the organization's creation.

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For convenience, you can create a Google Group or a Microsoft 365 group mailbox and use it as licensing notifications recipient instead of adding each recipient email manually on the Afi side.

Backup storage estimation and growth

You can estimate an approximate initial backup storage amount for your tenant by checking the current storage amount occupied on the Google Workspace or the Microsoft 365 side:

On the Afi side, the backup storage amount is calculated as a total size of all items and item versions in all historical backup snapshots kept by the Afi service, including the ones already deleted or rewritten on the Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 side. Thus, it is expected that the backup storage size will increase over time. The backup storage growth rate can be limited by configuring custom backup version retention, archiving rules and exclusions.

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Afi backups are forever incremental except for an initial data synchronization so, during each incremental backup, only changed items are synchronized and backup storage grows by the total size of added/updated items.

To analyze the backup storage consumption and find the backups that occupy the most of the storage space in an Afi tenant, you can download a list of all resources in the tenant together with their backup storage sizes on the Service → Settings → Info tab in the Afi portal (see the Download CSV button).

Quota enforcement

Afi enforces resource (user, virtual machine) and storage quotas according to the licensing model. Once any of the service quotas are exceeded, Afi issues a corresponding alert (see the Alerts tab in the Afi portal) and sends an alert notification to the Licensing notifications recipients. Alert notification emails are sent every 7 days until the issue is resolved.

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When the automatic license count adjustment is enabled and the service usage is within the adjustment thresholds, the Afi service won't issue any alerts even if the licensed service quotas are temporarily exceeded.

User quota enforcement

When a new active Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 user is protected and the licensed user quota is exceeded, subsequent backups for this user will fail with the Quota exceeded status code. To resolve the issue, you can purchase additional user licenses on the Licensing → Subscriptions tab or remove a backup SLA policy from any active users that you no longer want to backup periodically.

Storage quota enforcement

When the backup storage amount for a tenant exceeds 90% of the licensed backup storage quota, the Afi service will issue a warning-level alert Storage quota nearly exceeded. This alert is an informational one and no service restrictions are applied when it is active.

Once the backup storage amount exceeds the licensed backup storage quota, the Storage quota exceeded alert is issued and 30-day grace period for quota enforcement is started. During the grace period, quotas are not enforced and backups continue running. To resolve the exceeded backup storage quota issue, you can purchase additional backup storage on the Licensing → Subscriptions tab or configure custom backup version retention and archiving rules as well as delete any backups that you no longer need.

If the backup storage amount doesn't return under the licensed quota during the grace period, all backups for the tenant will start failing with the Quota exceeded status code until the quota is resolved. Once the backup storage amount is back under the quota, backups will continue to run.

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When the backup storage quota is exceeded and grace period is over, Afi won't synchronize new data from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, but will continue to apply the configured data retention and archiving rules.

Virtual machine quota enforcement

When a new active Microsoft Azure virtual machine is protected and the licensed virtual machine quota is exceeded, subsequent backups for this virtual machine will fail with the Quota exceeded status code. To resolve the issue, you can purchase additional virtual machine licenses on the Licensing → Subscriptions tab or remove a backup SLA policy from any active virtual machines that you no longer want to backup periodically.

Licensing for multi-tenant accounts

When a single Afi organization account contains several tenants (for example, a Microsoft 365 and a Google Workspace tenant), each of them is licensed separately and has its own licensed service quota which is not shared across the tenants.