How paying works, and why we do it this way
Nothing is charged until your password is recovered. No deposit, no assessment fee, and nothing to pay if we fail.
The order of things
Money moves once, late, and only if the work succeeded.
- We recover the password. On our own equipment, from the file your machine produced. If we cannot, we tell you and that is the end of it: you owe nothing.
- We describe what we found. How many characters the password is, and what kind: all digits, letters and digits mixed, upper and lower case, whether it contains symbols. Enough for you to recognise it as yours. Not enough to be any use.
- We invoice you. You get one final invoice, before the password is sent, listing everything owed: the unlock, and the guided remote session if you asked for one. Nothing is charged before it and nothing arrives after it.
- You pay, by one of the three methods below. We send you the details then, for your payment only.
- We send the password, as soon as the payment shows up. Type it at the BIOS prompt after pressing F2 at power on.
The description in step 2 exists so that you are not paying a stranger on faith. It is deliberately a description of the password's shape rather than any part of the password itself: a fragment would be worth something to somebody, and this is not.
What the invoice will say
Every machine has two prices, in US dollars. A supported machine, Intel Core 12th, 13th or 14th generation, is $70 with a proof of purchase and $120 without. An unsupported older machine, Intel Core 11th generation and below, is $100 with a proof of purchase and $150 without. An unsupported newer machine, Intel Core Ultra, is $150 with a proof of purchase and $200 without. The reason the two differ is that establishing that the laptop is yours is more work for us when there is nothing to check it against.
A guided remote session on a supported machine, if you asked us for one, is $25 on the same invoice. On an unsupported machine it is free, whoever asked. Section 7 of the agreement has the same figures laid out as a table, along with what counts as a proof of purchase and the fact that we may decline one. If we cannot recover the password there is no invoice at all.
We never publish payment details
No wallet address, no account number and no receiver name appears anywhere on this site. They go to you directly, when your password is ready, for that one payment. A payment address published on a web page is an open invitation to anyone who clones the page and swaps in their own, and we would rather that scam had nowhere to live.
So: if you ever find payment details for this service posted publicly (on a forum, in a comment, on a site that looks like this one) they are not ours. Ask us.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is the one we prefer, and the least friction for you. It arrives in minutes, the network fee is cents rather than tens of dollars, and it does not care which country either of us is in. We normally ask for USDT, and we will tell you which network to use.
If you have never touched crypto
You do not need to learn a new hobby for this. A Binance account is enough, and if you already have one you are most of the way there: buy the amount you need with your usual card or bank inside the app, then send it to the address we give you. That is two screens and a paste.
If you would rather not buy crypto at all, use Western Union instead: it is the next section and it costs you nothing extra beyond their fee.
Western Union or MoneyGram
Western Union or MoneyGram is the straightforward option if crypto is not for you. Both work from their website or app, or from any agent counter, and both are designed for exactly this: sending a modest amount to a named person in another country.
When your password is ready we will send you the receiver details. You send, you tell us the reference number, and we collect. Their fee is yours to pay and is usually a few dollars on an amount this size: check it in the app before you commit, because it varies by country and by how you pay.
It takes about ten minutes and needs no account with us, no card details shared, and no crypto.
Bank transfer
An ordinary international transfer works too, and we will send you the account details when the time comes.
Be aware of what your bank charges. On a payment this size a wire fee can be a meaningful fraction of the total, and it can take two or three working days to arrive. It is the slowest and usually the most expensive of the three, and we mention that rather than let you find out on the statement. If it is what you are comfortable with, it is fine by us.
What we do not take, and why
No cards, and no PayPal.
There is a PayPal link on the free unlocker, and it is a different thing: a donation towards the free tools and the site, from people who wanted to. It is not a way to pay for a recovery, and using it does not start one.
Not out of awkwardness. A card payment can be reversed by the person who made it, weeks after the fact, and a password cannot be un-sent. Card and PayPal buyer protection is built around goods that can be tracked and returned; it largely excludes intangible things, which means a dishonest buyer could take the password, claim it never arrived, and reclaim the money with very little we could do.
We could pretend that risk does not exist and price it in, which would mean charging everybody more to cover a few people. Or we could take payment methods that settle for good, and prove we have the password before you pay so that you are not extending any trust either. That is the trade we have made, and it is why the two halves of this page belong together. It is also why the prices above are what they are: there is no fraud premium buried in them, paid by honest customers to cover dishonest ones.
Also not accepted: gift cards, vouchers, or payment through anyone other than you. Any request to pay that way is not coming from us.
Refunds
Because the password cannot be handed back, a delivered password is not refundable. There is one exception, and it is a real one: if the password does not unlock your machine, we investigate and retry at no cost, and refund in full if we cannot make it work.
Section 8 of the agreement sets out exactly how that works, including the short video we ask for so that a genuine failure can be told apart from a change of mind.