I'll save the dough and, as you suggested, forego versioned backups and just have an extra CCC copy.
All is not lost! If you have at least version 5.1 of Carbon Copy Cloner, you can do versioned backups. Here's what CCC says:
"New in CCC 5.1 Versioned backups with APFS Snapshots
CCC now offers support for point-in-time restores by leveraging the snapshot feature of Apple's new APFS filesystem. CCC is also the first comprehensive snapshot management utility for macOS."
There is more info in the CCC Help, but one example is versioned backups every hour, just like Time Machine. I don't know the storage requirements, but you have CCC, so it is worth looking at.
