Why we publish our prices (and most data recovery companies won’t)
Go and price up a data recovery job. Open five websites, and count how many tell you what anything costs.
You’ll find service levels, success-rate claims, “free diagnostics” and a lot of invitations to call — but almost no prices. In most industries that would be strange. In data recovery it’s the business model. This article is about why, and about why we’ve chosen to do the opposite: our prices are published on this site, in pounds, for anyone to read before we’ve ever seen their drive.
Why the industry hides its prices
It isn’t an accident, and it isn’t because pricing is impossible. Any lab that has recovered thousands of drives knows roughly what each type of fault costs to fix — the patterns are well-worn. The number stays hidden because of when you’ll be told it.
The sequence is designed to run like this: your drive fails, you panic, you see “free diagnostic — call us today”, and you send the drive in. Nothing has been agreed, but something important has changed: your data is now in their building. The quote arrives only then — when saying no means couriers, delays and starting again from zero with your irreplaceable files in someone else’s hands. Quotes delivered at that moment have a habit of being much bigger than anything that would have been said out loud on day one.
A price you only learn after handing over the goods isn’t really a price. It’s an opening position.
What “free” is actually for
Nothing in business is free. A free diagnostic is a customer-acquisition cost, and it has to be earned back somewhere — inside the recovery price. We looked at this honestly ourselves, because we offer a free assessment too: the difference isn’t the word “free”, it’s whether the company will also talk real numbers before your drive leaves your hands. “Free” should be the start of the information, not all of it.
The same goes for the industry’s enthusiasm for the telephone. A number on a screen can be read calmly, compared, and slept on. A figure delivered by a trained voice, to an anxious person, with the drive already in custody, is a very different sales environment. We’d rather put our numbers in writing and let them speak for themselves.
What we publish, and why we can
Our prices are on the site for anyone to read: logical recoveries from £350 including VAT, mechanical recoveries from £450 including VAT, with RAID, NAS and complex cases quoted as a band up front on our prices page. No account manager, no callback, no drive held hostage while a number is “prepared” for you.
We can publish those figures for the least mysterious reason imaginable: we’ve done this thousands of times. An engineer who spends every working day inside failed drives knows what a clicking laptop drive or a dead external usually takes to recover. Publishing the bands costs us nothing except the ability to quote you a different number depending on how desperate you sound — which is precisely the ability we don’t want.
What a published price changes
Everything about the conversation, mostly in your favour. You can compare us against anyone else before your drive goes anywhere. You can decide at your kitchen table, not on the phone. And when our estimate arrives, you can check it against the very numbers we published — they’re the same ones for everybody, whether the drive holds a business’s accounts or one irreplaceable photo album.
It also keeps us honest. A published price is a promise made in public; a quoted-on-the-day price is whatever the day seemed to allow.
The honest limits of a published price
Published prices are bands, not crystal balls — nobody can tell you the exact, final cost of a recovery before the drive has been properly assessed, and you should be wary of anyone who claims otherwise. What a published band does is bracket the answer before you commit anything.
So here’s how it works in practice: tell us what’s happened using the enquiry form, and we’ll reply with the likely pricing tier for your fault before you send the drive. Once it’s been assessed, you get a firm quote, and nothing chargeable happens until you approve it. If you decline, your drive comes back reassembled at no charge. And if we can’t recover meaningful data, there’s no recovery fee at all — unconditionally.
The one-line version
If a company won’t put a number in writing before your drive is in their building, ask yourself why — and have a look at the seven questions worth asking before any drive leaves your hands. A lab that knows its work can price its work.
Ours is priced on the site. If you’d like our number on your drive, start a free estimate here — it takes about a minute, and you’ll get a reference number straight away.
