'It's not detected' describes a £200 job and a £900 job in the same four words. Storage faults overlap almost completely at the symptom level, and the fault — not the symptom — is what you're paying to have fixed. So any file recovery service quoting a firm price before an engineer has examined the drive is guessing, and you'd be the one funding the guess. The sequence that deserves your trust runs the other way: free diagnostic first, then one fixed quote in writing, then your unhurried yes or no.
What the examination establishes is the tier. Logical: the hardware is sound and the data's organisation isn't. Electronic: a failed board or bridge. Firmware: the drive's own internal code has fallen over. Mechanical: heads or motor, which brings the clean-air bench and donor parts into it. Price climbs tier by tier because parts, hours and equipment climb — no other honest reason exists for the number to move.
For bearings rather than promises: logical work on healthy hardware generally lands in the low hundreds of pounds; board-level and firmware repair occupies the middle hundreds; mechanical recovery with donor parts and clean-air time runs the upper hundreds and can pass a thousand; and multi-disk RAID, NAS and server work prices above single drives, scaling with drive count and mess. One flat figure from our own sheet, for calibration: CCTV and DVR recorder recovery is £400 + VAT, forensic-class, paid upfront.
Ranges orient; they don't price your job — that's what the diagnostic is for, and it's why the quote that follows is fixed. A fixed figure moves the risk of surprises onto the lab: however ugly the fault turns out to be once opened, the number you said yes to is the number on the invoice.
The recurring games deserve naming so you can spot them at distance. Headline prices 'from £49' that swell on 'assessment'. Assessment fees that stick whether anything comes back or not. A standard service slowed on purpose until the express tier sells itself. 'Success' defined so loosely that one readable file in ten thousand triggers the full bill.
Three questions cut through the lot. One: is the diagnostic free even if I walk away, drive returned? Two: once quoted, can the number move? Three: what counts as success, and do I see the recovered files verified before paying? Our answers, in writing and unblinking: yes, free and returned; no, fixed means fixed; success means the files you needed, checked and proven open. And the tariff in one line — logical recoveries run no fix, no fee; drives with mechanical, electrical, water or fire damage pay 50% of the quote upfront for the invasive bench stage; forensic-class jobs (ransomware, CCTV, BitLocker) are paid upfront in full.
Three habits shrink recovery bills reliably. Power off early — the drive that stops at the first symptom is the cheapest version of itself it will ever be. Skip the software pile-on — every overnight scan on failing hardware deepens the job an engineer inherits. And post rather than summon: tracked postage is pounds, call-outs are multiples, and the parcel network reaches this bench from anywhere in a day.
Start with the free diagnostic, or read your hardware's own page first: hard drives, SSDs, externals, RAID and NAS.
An honest price has three legs: a diagnostic that cost nothing, a quote that cannot move, and no fix no fee on logical work. Any file recovery service offering two legs out of three is a funnel wearing a lab coat.
Free diagnostic inside 2 working days of arrival, one fixed quote, no fix no fee on logical faults. Start online or ring the freephone.