Here's a rule that will protect you across the entire data recovery industry: a price quoted before anyone has examined your drive is not a price. It's bait. Nobody (not me, not the best clean-room lab in the country) can honestly price a recovery from a phone description, because the phone can't tell you what failed.
"My external drive isn't showing up" is one sentence that covers at least five different jobs: a dead USB bridge board (cheap), a corrupted file system (logical work), degraded heads that need careful hardware imaging (level 2), a failed firmware module (specialist knowledge, still sealed), or a head crash (clean room, four figures). Same sentence, same symptom, prices an order of magnitude apart. A company that hears that sentence and confidently says "$299!" has not diagnosed anything. It has priced getting your drive into its building: because once the drive is there, the real number arrives, and the escalation call works far better on a drive they're already holding.
Diagnosis isn't plugging the drive in to see if it mounts. Done right, it establishes what failed (electronics, firmware, mechanics, file system), what tier of work that requires, and what specifically the recovery will involve. The output you should receive has three parts:
Free evaluation is fine: I do free evaluations too. The tell isn't whether diagnosis costs money; it's whether the price precedes the diagnosis. Watch for the sequence: quote first, drive second, diagnosis never (just an escalation). The honest sequence is always: drive first, diagnosis second, price third, your decision fourth. Anyone selling you step three before step two has skipped the only part that determines the number.
A shop can honestly publish a price range by tier: that's not a sight-unseen quote, it's a menu. My level 1 and 2 work runs a flat $199–$599, published openly in my cost breakdown, but which number applies to your drive gets determined by diagnosis on my bench, told to you once, and never revised upward mid-job. Ranges up front, firm number after diagnosis, no surprises after approval: that's the shape of honest pricing anywhere you go.
So when you're calling around with a dead drive, flip the script. Don't ask "how much?"; ask "how will you determine how much?" The good shops light up at that question. The other kind quotes you $299. More questions worth asking are in my nine questions guide; my own process is at New Jersey data recovery, and diagnosis starts with a phone call: 908-428-9558.