Pricing in this trade has a reputation for being deliberately foggy, and it is a reputation that has been earned. The remedy is unglamorous: publish the bands, explain what puts a job in each, and say plainly what happens when somebody turns the quote down.
Nobody wants the reasoning before the number, so here is the entire list. £250 + VAT covers memory cards, USB sticks and pen drives. £300 + VAT covers any single hard drive or SSD, with NVMe at the same figure. £400 + VAT covers CCTV and DVR recorder drives, and BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drives. From £500 + VAT covers RAID arrays, NAS boxes, SANs and servers, rising with the number of member disks. £800 + VAT covers a forensic investigation with a full written report. That is the whole table, there is nothing underneath it, and the figures are identical for a household in Warfield and a firm on one of the business parks off the A329(M).
What the list is not is a quote for your particular job before anyone has looked at it. The diagnostic costs nothing, closes 2 working days after the device is booked in, and produces one fixed written figure that does not move afterwards. Anybody who has priced your recovery over the phone from a spoken description of the symptom has guessed with your money and has kept the right to revise the guess once your drive is in their building. The question worth asking a laboratory is not what it costs but which band the device falls in, because on an honest price list the media is what decides.
Two separate questions get muddled here, and pulling them apart explains most of the confusion about recovery pricing. The type of storage determines the number. The nature of the fault determines the payment terms. Faults come in four families, and it is worth knowing which one you are describing when you ring anybody. A logical fault leaves the hardware in perfect health and only the organisation of the data wrong — a deletion, a format, a damaged index, a partition that has gone missing, an operating system installed over the top of the old one. An electronic fault means a dead controller board, a failed bridge or a burnt power section. A firmware fault means the drive's own code or its service area has collapsed, and putting that right needs equipment that speaks to the disk at a level no operating system ever touches. A mechanical fault means heads or spindle motor, and brings with it a clean-air bench, matched donor parts and a great deal of time.
It is the family, not the price, that sets how you pay, and the wording used across this network does not vary: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. So a logical job that produces nothing produces no invoice either. A drive damaged by impact, water, fire or a power fault takes half the quoted figure upfront and the balance only on success, for an entirely unromantic reason — donor hardware has to be sourced and paid for long before anybody knows how the job ends. Be sceptical of anyone who tells you otherwise: no bench that has to buy parts in advance can put board-level, chip-level or mechanical work on a no-win basis, and one claiming to will find another way to charge you.
One case is worth stating flatly because it is priced wrongly all over the industry. Ransomware follows the hardware. An encrypted single drive is £300 + VAT and an encrypted server, NAS or array is from £500 + VAT. It is not a forensic job, it is not charged at £800 + VAT, and the criminal cause does not change what the bench physically has to do to the disks.
Two very different devices share that figure for the same underlying reason: both need work before a standard tool can read anything at all. CCTV and DVR recorders almost never use a normal file system. Manufacturers write footage into proprietary containers, often as a continuous ring buffer with the index held separately, and a disk pulled out of a recorder frequently presents as unformatted to any computer you attach it to. Recovering it means identifying the recorder family, working out how the frames and their timestamps are laid down, and rebuilding playable footage out of that — which is why DVR work is one of the stated exclusions from no fix, no fee.
Encrypted drives sit in the same band for a different reason: the extra work is in handling the key material safely and decrypting an image without ever writing to the original. Be very clear about the limit here, because it is the honest part. A BitLocker volume cannot be recovered without a valid key. If you have the 48-digit recovery key, or you can retrieve it from the Microsoft account it was escrowed to or from Active Directory, the job is entirely ordinary. If nobody anywhere has it, no laboratory can do anything with the volume, and one that says otherwise is selling you a diagnostic you will pay for twice. Before assuming the worst, it is worth reading where BitLocker keys are actually stored — most people who think theirs is lost have not yet looked in the right place.
A forensic investigation is a different product from a recovery, not a more expensive version of one. A recovery answers the question can these files be got back. An investigation answers a question somebody may later have to defend: what was on this device, when, who put it there, what left the building and by what route. The figure covers the analysis and the written report — methodology stated, exhibits numbered, findings separated from opinion, and the whole thing drafted so it can go in front of a solicitor, a tribunal or a regulator without needing translation.
You commission that deliberately, for employment disputes, suspected data theft, partnership fallings-out or matters heading towards court. You do not stumble into it by having a bad week. A firm recovering from an encryption run, a failed array or a dropped laptop is buying a recovery, and the invoice should say so.
Name the tactics and they become easy to spot. A from-£49 headline that grows once an assessment has taken place. An assessment charge that falls due whether or not a single file is returned. A standard turnaround left slow enough that the express tier sells itself. And a definition of success elastic enough that one openable file in ten thousand justifies the whole invoice.
Four questions cut through all of it. Say I turn the quote down — is the diagnostic still free, and does my device come back to me? Is the price you have given me capable of changing? How do you define success, and do I get to see and check the recovered files before paying? And is the work done by you or posted on to somebody else? Written answers here, in the same order. Turning it down costs you the return postage only. A fixed price stays fixed. Success means the material you asked for, opened and verified rather than counted. And every job is worked at Guildford Business Park, which is the address your parcel goes to directly — not a front office that forwards it on.
Habits shrink a recovery bill much further than haggling ever will. Switch it off early: a drive powered down at the first unfamiliar noise is as cheap as that job is ever going to be, and the same drive after a fortnight of hopeful retries has become a harder and less complete one. Leave the software alone, because an overnight scan across tired hardware spends reads the paid recovery will need, and some free tools write to the disk while the progress bar insists nothing is being changed. And post it rather than sitting on it — tracked postage costs a few pounds, there is no collection charge because nothing is collected, and a parcel posted in Bracknell reaches the Guildford bench the next working day.
A note for students and researchers, since these parcels arrive in waves that track the submission dates. Reading, Royal Holloway and the colleges out towards Camberley and Sandhurst send the same job over and over: three years of work held in one place, on a portable drive of a certain age that has taken at least one knock. The cheapest insurance ever devised is a duplicate held on something that is not connected to the first thing. If it has already stopped working, begin with the free diagnostic, or read whichever hardware page matches the device: hard drives, SSDs, external drives, memory cards, RAID, NAS and CCTV and DVR.
Read a price list backwards to test it. Ask what happens when the answer is no — when you decline the quote, or when the recovery fails. If the diagnostic was free, the figure was fixed, and a logical job that produces nothing produces no bill, the number at the top can be trusted. If any of those three has a condition attached, the headline was never the real price.
Free diagnostic closing 2 working days after your device is booked in, one fixed written quote, and no fix, no fee on logical faults. Cards and USB sticks £250 + VAT, any single drive or SSD £300 + VAT.