VPS Snaps vs SnapShooter
Two products with nearly the same plan, and one real difference.
Job counts and backup cadences line up tier for tier, and at every matched tier — monthly or billed annually — we cost less. What separates us beyond price is that their plans include hosted storage and ours include none, plus who owns the company. Here is the whole comparison, numbers included.
Backup Jobs
Automated backup schedules
postgres-main nightly
Last run 6h ago
web-01 snapshots
Last run 9h ago
api-prod volumes
Last run 4m ago
staging-db weekly
Last run 3d ago
The short version
We wrote both columns. If the left one describes you, buy theirs — you will be happier and we would rather not have the churn.
Pick SnapShooter if…
Three situations where they are the better answer.
- You want one vendor to hold the backups as well as schedule them. Their plans bundle storage — 10 GB on Lite up to 240 GB on Agency — so there is no bucket to create and no second bill to reason about. We have nothing equivalent, by choice.
- You are all-in on DigitalOcean. SnapShooter is part of DigitalOcean, so the integration has an owner with a direct interest in keeping it deep.
- You need one-click restore for every backup type. Ours covers database and file runs; Docker, Kubernetes and provider snapshots are still restored by hand or from the provider's console — see the FAQ below.
Pick VPS Snaps if…
Six situations where we are.
- You want the lower price. We cost less than SnapShooter at every matched paid tier, whether you pay monthly or billed annually — see the table below for the exact numbers, checked against their live pricing toggle in both billing modes.
- You already have object storage and would rather not pay for a second copy of it. Every backup lands in your bucket at your provider's per-GB rate, with no allowance to outgrow.
- You want chat alerts without an upsell. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and Discord are on every plan we sell, including Free.
- You have infrastructure with no inbound route — behind NAT, a VPN, or inside a private VPC. Our Agent dials out over a WebSocket, so there is no port to open.
- You want a vendor with no stake in which cloud you run on. We are independent, and the seven provider integrations are all first-class.
- You want the gaps written down. The features page carries a published list of what we cannot do yet.
Price, tier by tier
Matched by position in each range. The tiers line up unusually closely — same job counts, same cadence ceilings — so the price column is close to a like-for-like read, with the storage caveat below.
| Tier | VPS Snaps | SnapShooter | Their included storage | Fastest cadence (both) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Free | 500 MB | Every 24 hours |
| Starter | $15/mo$10/mo billed annually | $19/mo$13/mo billed annually · Lite | 10 GB | Every 24 hours |
| Standard | $45/mo$30/mo billed annually | $49/mo$33/mo billed annually · Startup | 60 GB | Every 12 hours |
| Pro | $85/mo$57/mo billed annually | $99/mo$66/mo billed annually · Business | 120 GB | Every 5 minutes |
| Agency | $175/mo$117/mo billed annually | $199/mo$132/mo billed annually · Agency | 240 GB | Every 5 minutes |
Read that honestly: we cost less than SnapShooter at every matched paid tier — $4 to $24 less per month depending on tier, or $3 to $15 less per month if you both pay annually. They also run a sixth tier, Agency Pro, at $1,400/mo ($999/mo billed annually), which we have no equivalent for. The catch, if there is one, is storage — covered next.
We never became a storage company
It is the decision everything else on this page follows from, and it cuts both ways.
You connect a bucket — S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, UpCloud, or anything else S3-compatible via a custom endpoint — and every archive is written there under a prefix you choose. We store the metadata: run status, byte size, MD5 checksum, log lines. We do not store a copy of the backup, we do not meter your gigabytes, and there is no allowance to graduate out of.
The cost of that is real. There is a bucket to create and an access key to scope on day one, and retention on the bucket side is your lifecycle rule to write, not ours to run — we prune the provider snapshots we created, never objects in your storage.
The benefit is also real, and it is the reason we chose it: leaving costs you nothing. Cancel and the archives stay where they always were, in formats gunzip and tar can open without us.
Storage Destinations
S3-compatible storage for your backups
Primary backups
acme-uploads/db · us-east-1
Tested 2h ago
Offsite copy
acme-offsite · auto
Tested 1d ago
Cold archive
acme-archive/2026 · eu-central-003
Tested 6d ago
Line by line
Only rows that can be checked against a page you can open. Where their pricing page is silent, the cell says that rather than claiming they lack the feature.
| VPS Snaps | SnapShooter | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape of the plans | ||
| Free plan with no card | ||
| Backups you can configure, entry paid tier | 3 | 3 |
| Backups you can configure, top matched tier | 250 | 250 |
| Fastest cadence, entry paid tier | Daily | Every 24 hours |
| Fastest cadence, top tier | Every 5 minutes | Every 5 minutes |
| Annual billing discount | ~33% | 34% |
| Storage | ||
| Bring your own S3-compatible bucket | ||
| Vendor-hosted storage included | Not offered — bring your own bucket | 500 MB to 240 GB by tier |
| Retention of objects in your bucket | Your lifecycle rule, not ours | Not on their pricing page |
| Notifications, as listed on the pricing page | ||
| Slack | ||
| Microsoft Teams | Every plan | Not on their pricing page |
| Google Chat | Every plan | Not on their pricing page |
| Discord | Every plan | Not on their pricing page |
| Arbitrary custom webhook URL | Agency plan | Not on their pricing page |
SnapShooter prices, tiers, cadences and included storage above were checked directly against snapshooter.com/pricing in September 2026, with both the "Pay Monthly" and "Pay Yearly" states of their billing toggle captured — their annual price is calculated client-side and never appears in a plain fetch of the page, so both states have to be seen to be reported accurately. Prices may have changed since. One further fact about them appears above and comes from DigitalOcean rather than their pricing page: that DigitalOcean acquired SnapShooter. Our column is read live from the plan records this app enforces.
Powerful features to give you peace of mind
Rest easy knowing your data and your reputation are safe.
- Bring your own storage
- Backups land in your own S3-compatible bucket — Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, or plain S3. You hold the keys and the data.
- Snapshots stay with your provider
- Provider snapshots are created through the provider's own API and never leave your account. We store the snapshot ID, not the image.
- Seven providers, one dashboard
- DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure — scheduled and reviewed from the same place.
- Schedules that fit your traffic
- Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a fixed interval in minutes — anchored to your timezone, so a 02:00 job stays at 02:00 across a DST change.
- Retention that prunes itself
- Set how many days to keep. Older snapshots and archives are cleaned up after each successful run, so storage bills stay flat.
- Step-by-step run logs
- Every run records what it did, in order, with warnings and errors kept in place — so a failure tells you which step broke.
- Complete run history
- Status, duration, byte size, and what triggered each run, kept per job. Proof the backup ran, long after the night it ran.
- Checksummed on upload
- Every archive is hashed as it streams to your bucket and the checksum is stored with the run, so you can verify what landed.
- Run on demand
- Trigger any job by hand before a migration or a risky deploy, without touching its schedule or its retention window.
- Alerts on five channels
- Email plus Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Discord — on success, on failure, and on a job that missed its schedule entirely.
- Encrypted credentials
- SSH keys, database passwords, and storage secrets are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they touch the database.
- Team access with roles
- Invite your team into a shared workspace as owner, admin, or member, so backups outlive whoever set them up.
“The biggest advantage for us is that VPS Snaps works with the infrastructure we already have instead of forcing us into a proprietary backup environment. Provider snapshots stay inside our cloud account, while database and file archives can go directly into our own bucket.”
FAQs
Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out to our support team.
Are you cheaper than SnapShooter?
Yes, at every matched paid tier, whether you pay monthly or billed annually — by $4 to $24 a month depending on tier, or $3 to $15 a month if you both commit annually. The prices in the table above were checked directly against their live pricing page with both billing-toggle states captured, not a single scraped default, so compare them yourself if you want to double-check. The one place this isn't simply "cheaper": their plans bundle storage and ours don't, so if you'd be paying for object storage separately anyway, weigh that cost in before deciding which is the better overall deal.
Can I run both, or move between them?
Yes, and there is nothing to migrate in either direction. Provider snapshots live in your cloud account, not in a backup vendor's system, and our archives are plain .sql.gz and .tar.gz objects in your own bucket. Running both against the same server for a fortnight and keeping whichever you prefer costs you a free plan on one side.
Do you have a restore button? Do they?
We do, for database and file backups: restore a run onto any server in your workspace, with a check-only mode that verifies the archive without touching anything. It is not universal — Docker and Kubernetes runs are not covered yet — and the limits are listed on our features page rather than buried. We are not going to characterise what their dashboard does; check it yourself before you decide, because for a lot of teams this is the whole decision.
Is this comparison kept current?
Our column is read live from the same plan records the app enforces, so it cannot drift. Their column was checked against both states of their live pricing toggle — a plain fetch of their page can't see the annual price at all, since it's calculated client-side after a click — with the date printed under the table. If it looks stale, treat their pricing page as the source of truth, and tell us so we can fix it.
Run both for a fortnight. Keep the one you trust.
Our free plan needs no card and never expires, and there is nothing to migrate in either direction — the artefacts live in your account, not ours.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.