Nobody wants the theory before the number, so here is the entire list in one place. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, with NVMe drives included at that same figure. CCTV and DVR recorders are £400 + VAT. BitLocker-encrypted drives are £400 + VAT. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the number of disks and the state they arrive in. Forensic work with a written report is £800 + VAT. Those figures are the same for a household in Woolton and a firm on Old Hall Street, and there is no postcode loading on any of them.
What the list is not is a quote for your job before anybody has seen it. The diagnostic costs nothing, it is finished within 2 working days of your drive reaching the lab, and it produces one fixed written figure that does not move afterwards. A firm that has priced your recovery down the phone from a description of the symptom has guessed with your money and kept the right to revise it later. Ask what the media is instead, because on this list the media sets the price.
Here is the bit that catches people out. What the storage is decides the figure. What has gone wrong with it decides the terms, and faults arrive in four families. Logical, where the hardware is fine and the arrangement of the data is not. Electronic, meaning a dead board, a dead bridge or a failed power section. Firmware, where the drive's own code or service area has collapsed and the fix needs kit that speaks to the disk underneath anything an operating system can reach. And mechanical, meaning heads or motor, which pulls in the clean-air bench, matched donor parts and a great many hours.
That distinction decides how you pay, and it is written the same way across this network: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. So logical faults carry no invoice if nothing comes back. A drive damaged by impact, by an electrical fault, by water or by fire takes 50% of the quoted figure up front, with the balance due only on success. Forensic-classed work, meaning ransomware, CCTV and BitLocker, is settled in advance. Note what that does and does not mean for a ransomware job: the terms change, the price does not, so an encrypted drive is still £300 + VAT and a server, NAS or array still starts at £500 + VAT. The £800 + VAT figure buys a forensic investigation with a written report, which is a different piece of work and not something every attack needs. Nobody should be telling you that board-level, chip-level or mechanical work runs on no fix, no fee, because it does not, here or anywhere else that has to buy donor parts.
The tricks are worth naming, because they are easy to see coming once you know them. Headline prices from £49 that swell once an assessment has happened. Assessment fees payable whether or not a single file comes back. A standard service slowed deliberately until the express tier sells itself. And a definition of success so loose that a single readable file out of ten thousand earns them the full invoice.
Three questions get past all of it. If I turn the quote down, does the diagnostic stay free, and does my media come home? Can the figure you have quoted move later? And what does success mean here specifically, meaning do I get to see the recovered files listed and checked before I pay? Written answers from this bench: yes, it stays free and the media comes back for the cost of return postage; no, a fixed figure is fixed; and success means the files you asked for, opened and confirmed.
Three habits shrink a recovery bill more than any haggling will. Switch it off early. A drive shut down at the first odd noise is as cheap as that job will ever be, and the same drive after a fortnight of hopeful retries is the expensive version of itself. Leave the software alone. Every overnight scan across tired hardware makes the job an engineer inherits harder, and a few of those tools write to the disk while the box on screen insists they do not. And post it rather than sit on it. Tracked postage runs to a few pounds, there is no collection service to pay for in the first place, and a parcel posted in Liverpool is on a bench in Manchester the next working day.
One more, aimed at students. The University of Liverpool, LJMU and Hope set their deadlines in clusters, and the parcels turn up in clusters to match, more often than not a dissertation living on a four-year-old external drive that has been dropped at least once. Where the work matters, the cheapest insurance going is a second copy on something that is not plugged into the first. If that is not possible, the free diagnostic is the place to begin, or read whichever hardware page matches what has failed: hard drives, SSDs, external drives, RAID and NAS.
Three things hold an honest price up: a diagnostic that cost you nothing, a figure in writing that cannot move later, and no fix, no fee on logical work. Two out of the three is not a bargain, it is a funnel in a lab coat.
Free diagnostic within 2 working days of arrival, one fixed written quote, no fix no fee on logical faults. Cards £250 + VAT, any one drive or SSD £300 + VAT.