You have to of course look at "cost of living" in your specific region as well; in New York City for example, $1100 might get you a pretty nice closet to live in; but somewhere more rural $1100 may have you in a 3-4 bedroom house with a big yard, and money to spare.

I can understand your charges must be lower in South Africa, but as far as donors go they don't really vary in price for us, how do you make enough profit to make a living if the donor is $200USD and you charge $380 for cleanroom work?

What do you do for a Bronx customer, a college student, who has a drive that has damaged heads from a drop on the floor and the part costs $310 and needs data recovery? Let's say a Passport USB 3.0 external?

Obviously data is important as she/he has all their college work on the drive.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Surely you should charge according to the type of repair needed and the resources / time needed for it. For some types of repairs you could be looking at $300 just for the parts...

You should see what I charge a corporation.. Unreal!

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

People charging different rates to corporations *just* because it is a corporation isn't ethical in my eyes either. True: Most corporate recoveries DO cost more, but this is because they usually have some encryption, or they are a NAS, or a RAID, etc.

Charge based off the amount of time and effort your engineer will need to spend to get the data, and of course keep in mind the amount of R&D that was required to be able to recovery said case. Sure there are things I can fix in 5 minutes now, but it took my hours and hours to figure out how to fix it in 5 minutes, and that counts for a lot in this industry.

Totally agree

_________________
SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Meh, many corporations are unethical. Why not return the favor?

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

It is for this reason that people don't trust the data recovery world.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

And we don't trust people, so the favor is returned and the loop is closed

To maintain a good image (no pun intended) I believe that data recovery companies should offer reduced fees or freebies from time to time - to the small guy.

Doesn't have to be a lot. But something to spread goodwill.

It's something I do from time to time. If I see personal videos and pictures and journals and things like that; AND if I'm in a good mood, I'll drop the price at random or do it for free.

As soon as its corporate and business data I max out the price. No regrets.

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.