Vault Pricing Model

In this article: 

• About the Vault Pricing Model
• Background on Vault Pricing Model
• Standard Vault Costs
• Additional Vault Features & Costs

About the Vault Pricing Model

Vault pricing is unique in that it is based on a low-cost, one-time, up-front fee per-terabyte for perpetual preservation of, and access to, data deposited into Vault. There are no costs for access to the Vault application, no annual storage costs for data preserved in Vault, and no costs for downloading or taking data out of Vault. Once you have purchased a data budget for preserving data in Vault, you have as long as you need to use that data budget and additional storage can be purchased at any time. Users will also have access to the Vault application, and any data preserved therein, in perpetuity. There are no expiration or termination dates associated with access to your Vault account.

The Vault cost model is in keeping with the successful cost model also used in Internet Archive’s paid digitization and Archive-It web archiving services that collectively have been used by thousands of organizations. The Vault cost model also differs from many other preservation services, which often rely on commercial cloud infrastructure and its associated annual storage and data egress fees. As a non-profit digital library advancing access to knowledge, Internet Archive believes in making its paid digital library services as cost-effective and affordable as possible for mission-aligned institutions of any type, any size, and with any budget. An up-front, one-time cost also allows users to better plan for the ongoing costs of their digital preservation activities and, ideally, helps them build larger and richer digital collections.

Background on Vault Pricing Model

Vault is able to achieve this cost model due to the fact that Internet Archive owns and operates its own data centers. As noted in our Policies and Procedures documentation, this non-profit, public-good infrastructure is key to keeping infrastructure costs reasonable and prioritizing long-term preservation and access, not commercial or mercantile interests. The Vault pricing model, like those of other Internet Archive paid services, is also based on extensive research into the economics of digital preservation and the knowledge gained from running data centers and infrastructure hardware for over 25 years. Internet Archive has worked with digital preservation expert David Rosenthal on economic modeling for the cost of digital preservation. See the related blog posts and resources that describe this work.

Given the mission of Internet Archive and many of its partners and users, Vault pricing also gives preference to publicly available digital collections. Thus, Vault costs are lower for the preservation of data and digital collections that are publicly accessible online, regardless of where that material is available or in what format. For example, if you are depositing TIFF files into Vault and JPEG versions of those TIFFs are publicly available on your own website, that qualifies as a public collection as far as pricing. Vault also enables users to preserve private data and collections at a higher cost, but with the same one-time pricing model.

Standard Vault Costs

Vault strives to make digital preservation available to any organization and aims to meet the budgetary realities of many different use cases. The Vault team is always happy to discuss how to make use of the service possible for your specific case or organization. In general, Vault costs are in the below ranges.

• For public collections: $1,000 to $1,400 USD per terabyte (1024 GB)
• For private collections: $1,400 to $1,800 USD per terabyte (1024 GB)

There is a price discount for any organization that is or has been a user of other Internet Archive paid digital library services, such as digitization or Archive-It. Also, consortial, multi-institutional, or other bulk purchase discounts may be available.

The Archiving & Data Services division that runs the Vault service also gets many grants and philanthropic contributions that often help subsidize or fully fund the cost of Vault for qualifying organizations or projects. For example, our Community Webs program has been awarded funding to subsidize the cost of 100 terabytes of Vault preservation storage for use by participating public libraries. If you are interested in collaborating around grant seeking, or are looking to write Vault costs into a grant application, contact the Vault team and we can help with any quotations or grant writing.

Additional Vault Features & Costs

Vault includes a number of additional features, such as the ability to choose the geographic location(s) in which your data is stored (such as Canada or Europe), the ability to receive more frequent fixity audit and repair reports beyond the twice-a-year reporting in the standard Vault service package, and other add-on features. If you are interested in any of these, or even features or add-on services that do not yet exist or may still be in development, please let us know. Internet Archive does many ad-hoc, on-demand contracted and specialized archiving, web, and data services and will aim to meet your needs even if it is not part of the current Vault product.  

To discuss use cases, get a quote, ask any questions not in the help documentation, or express interest in learning more, you can contact the Vault team by completing the Vault Interest Form and you can also email us at [e-mail].

Last updated on January 17, 2023.