People assume a little SD card should cost less to recover than a big hard drive. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the sixty-cent piece of plastic is the harder job on the bench. Here’s how small-media pricing actually breaks down, so the quote makes sense before you ever get one.
The pricing tiers
Deleted photos, formatted card, card that mounts but acts wrong: $150–$250 at my bench. The card works; the data organization is damaged. Photos and video recover especially well because their file formats are easy to identify and carve out of a raw read, even when the file system is gone entirely. If you shot a wedding on it and then formatted it in-camera, this tier is usually where you are — and the sooner the card stops being used, the more complete the recovery. (More on that in SD card says it needs formatting.)
Card or drive not recognized at all — dead controller: $250–$500. The controller chip that manages the flash memory has died, and the data has to come off the NAND chips directly. For devices with separate controller and memory chips (most full-size SD cards and standard thumb drives), that means reading the NAND and reconstructing the controller’s data layout — real specialist work, but well-trodden.
Monolithic devices — microSD, and the tiny one-piece drives: honestly case-by-case. Everything is sealed in a single chip; there’s nothing to remove. Access requires mapping microscopic test points on the chip itself. Some models are documented and workable; some aren’t practical. This is a tier where I’ll tell you at evaluation whether yours is worth attempting — and you pay nothing to find that out, and nothing if it doesn’t succeed.
Physically broken devices vary by what broke. A snapped USB connector with a healthy board behind it is a modest repair-and-extract job at the low end. A flash drive snapped through the board itself depends on what the crack went through.
Why small media can out-cost a hard drive job
The material is smaller; the work isn’t. A NAND-level recovery involves chip removal, specialized readers, and reconstructing wear-leveling logic that differs by controller — hours of skilled work regardless of whether the card held 32GB or 512GB. Price scales with labor and difficulty, never with gigabytes. Anyone charging per-GB on a memory card is pricing your desperation, not the work.
The value question
Here’s the conversation I actually have with people: the card cost $12, so a $300 recovery feels wrong. But the card was never the thing being priced — the only copy of your kid’s first birthday is. That’s a decision only you can make, and my job is to give you a firm number and an honest read on the odds so you can make it with real information. What I won’t do is charge you to find out. Evaluation is free, the quote is flat, and no recovery means no charge.
Free evaluation. Firm quote. No data, no charge.
The bottom line
Deleted or formatted cards: $150–$250 and good odds. Dead controllers: $250–$500 for standard devices, case-by-case for monolithic microSD. And whatever tier you’re in — stop using the card now. Continued use is the only thing that makes photo recovery worse at every price point.
Card or thumb drive with irreplaceable files on it? Start a case — tell me the device type and what happened, and the evaluation costs you nothing.