How Our Pricing Works
In short, on the bottom line, we think we will be among the lowest prices you will find for the level and quality of data recovery we provide, no matter what others may quote over the phone before seeing your drive. Our prices for single hard drive and SSD recoveries start at $300 for a best-case-scenario, average about $600-$700, and end at $1900 for a worst-case-scenario. How much your individual recovery will cost is almost completely determined by how difficult your case is, which can only be determined after a physical examination of the failing drive. Our prices for RAID recoveries start at $500 per drive in the array. Please call us for more details. Sometimes we can provide educated guesses if we know the symptoms of your individual case, but ultimately, we will need to actually spend some time evaluating your individual drive in the lab to determine what we have to quote with certainty. Call: 512-444-3282 with questions or to get started.
Please keep in mind that not all data recovery labs are equal. Many places will tell customers what they want to hear just to get the drive in the door, and then adapt the story to reality after they have your drive.
There are a number of business models that other ‘data recovery’ companies use to get your business.
1) A popular model is the flat rate low quote, in which a beginner-level company will quote around $395 to recover your data, supposedly under any circumstance. Here’s what happens with these companies: They get a flood of drives from people surprised at how cheap the service is compared to all the other data recovery labs, and because there are apparently no surprises in regard to prices. Their ‘techs’, which often know very basic computer skills, very quickly hook the drives up as a slave in a computer and run data recovery software on the drive (if needed). If it works they just made a quick $395, if not, hardly any time was wasted, and they’ll just say “the drive was unrecoverable”, or just re-quote a much higher price now that they have your data. This is especially effective if an evaluation fee is charged, as they can spend just 5 minutes with your drive and still make $50-$100 to tell you it’s unrecoverable. It doesn’t give them a reason to try very hard to recover your data. The problems with this are that running software directly on a failing drive can be what finishes off a dying hard drive. Also, running software such as the dreaded Spinrite can make changes that cannot be taken back which can further hinder or even destroy chances of recovery.
IF THEY CAN RECOVER IT FOR $395 SO CAN WE- AND WE’LL DO IT SAFELY! Our price cap is set higher than this for a reason, and it’s not because we charge more for the same work: We can do so much more than these simple data recovery companies can do, but it takes time, skill, and usually costs us over a hundred dollars in parts for each attempt at a cleanroom recovery. Also, the usual first step to our recoveries involves making a clone of your hard drive. Any data recovery company that doesn’t usually make a clone of your drive (or at least of the important data area of the drive) first will be taking unnecessary chances with the only copy of the data, and their first attempt may ruin further attempts to recover data. By working with a clone, the original drive is accessed only once, and it is the safest beginning to any true data recovery.
2) Similar to the above, there was formerly a business in Austin that made the false claim that they did “90% of the recoveries for $400”.
While this sounds great, this is an impossible task, (especially for a lab with only minimal data recovery equipment and knowhow), and one that of course no customer has any way of checking. There’s no other way to put it besides that they were just lying and saying whatever it took to get drives in the door.
Over the years we were brought at least 40 known drives that had been to this establishment first. The story was always the same: After checking the drive in, their customers were usually called the next day and told something like, “We’re sorry, but your hard drive is in the 10% that we can’t recover for $400, because it has severe internal damage and needs cleanroom work. We don’t have a cleanroom here, but we’re partnered with a lab that we can send the drive to that has one. The quote for the recovery, because of the extreme damage will be $2000 and take on average 2-4 weeks.”
The important part: Of those approximate 40 cases that we were able to re-evaluate after the other place quoted $2000, about 15% of them were $300 cases for us, and were finished the next day, saving the customer $1700 and 2 weeks on a single drive. Many of those cases were about as easy as we ever see come in, despite having been misdiagnosed as being internally damaged cleanroom cases.
About 55% more of the cases we were able to re-evaluate wound up being mid-level recoveries for us, and were quoted between $400-$1000, still saving customers over $1000 per case.
But we fully admit that, even for us, about 30% of them actually were worst-case-scenario cleanroom level cases, and even we had to quote $1700-$1900 for them.
The main difference is that in choosing IT Data Recovery, you’re going direct, to a real, professional, cleanroom data recovery lab. We won’t quote $1900 for a case that should be half that price, and we’ll be able to determine that during the evaluation.
3) Full service lab that charges evaluation fee: This is understandable, as an in-depth evaluation will often take several hours to a full day or longer (if they truly do it), BUT: You are definitely committing to that fee, and the company knows that because of that, you will be more likely to approve whatever they quote, so they will have the ability to quote higher and have more people just accept the high pricing. Many of these labs sometimes charge over $3000 for data recovery on just one drive. The situation that often occurs is that they will either make double what we would charge, or if you don’t approve, at least they still made something for not doing anything intensive or that cost them anything besides some tech time.
OUR PRICING MODEL: There is no evaluation fee for a reason: We want you to know exactly what you will have to pay before you have to commit to any price, and we don’t want to charge you anything if we don’t recover your data. Some recoveries are easy (for us) and only warrant our minimum of $300 which is lower than most of the companies in group 1 charge. Other recoveries can take days or weeks of tech time and sometimes require parts that are hard to find that we may pay over $300 for, just to attempt to recover your data. Obviously, for these cases we must charge more.
Our prices for data recovery on single hard drives will range from $300-$1900 for standard-paced service. After evaluation, you will receive an exact quote. Quotes for priority cases will range from $400-$2500.
RAID recoveries start at $500/drive, and because of the complexities we have no set price cap for these recoveries. As with our other recoveries, you will know exactly how much the recovery will cost after our evaluation, and before you commit to a price beyond the minimum quote.
Our prices at the bottom line are very often at least 20% less than most of our competitors charge, and we’ve often been able to re-quote competitor prices at less than half of what they quoted…it just depends on the case and the competitor, as every data recovery situation is unique.