Why Your Repair Costs What It Costs

You get a repair quote and your first thought is: that’s too much. We know, because we hear it regularly. This post breaks down exactly what goes into that number.

“My phone only cost £400.” “I could buy a new one for that.” “The shop down the road quoted me half.”

These reactions make complete sense. But they’re comparing the wrong things. A repair quote isn’t a percentage of your device’s value. It’s the cost of a specific job done by a specific person with specific tools and parts. This post breaks down exactly what goes into that number — not to justify our prices, but so you can see for yourself what you’re paying for.

The Replacement Part

The part itself is usually the simplest cost to understand — but it’s less straightforward than it looks.

Take an iPhone screen. There isn’t one “iPhone screen” on the market. There are dozens of quality tiers, from budget aftermarket panels at £15 that show slightly different colours and lose responsiveness within months, to premium aftermarket screens at £60-80 that match the original in colour accuracy, touch sensitivity, and durability. We choose a tier we’re confident in, and we tell you which one you’re getting. We don’t have the appetite to offer the cheapest options — we’ve seen the results, and we don’t want our name attached to them.

Parts pricing isn’t fixed, either. It shifts based on supply, demand, and factors entirely outside our control. A good example from the past year: a replacement screen for a Microsoft Surface Pro 9 currently costs us £389 for the part alone. A Surface Pro 8 screen is £369. Twelve months ago, we were paying roughly half that for the same parts. What changed? According to our Chinese suppliers, a factory producing these panels apparently shut down. We can’t verify that independently, but the prices doubled and the supply tightened — that much is fact.

There’s a broader pressure at work too. The sheer number of phone models on the market means Chinese parts manufacturers produce smaller batches of more variants, rather than large runs of a few. That pushes per-unit costs up for anything outside the top-selling models. For popular devices like iPhones, parts are more available — but the range of quality tiers is so wide that choosing the right one takes experience, and the cheapest option often isn’t one we’d put our name behind.

Ordering parts directly from China is cheaper, but the lead time is measured in weeks, quality is inconsistent, and defective batches mean losses we absorb. So we source from UK and European stock where possible — faster, more reliable, but not the cheapest route.

The Technician’s Time

When a customer says “it’s just a screen replacement,” they’re picturing someone unscrewing a panel and clicking a new one into place. That’s roughly how it worked in 2014.

In 2026, replacing an iPhone screen means transferring the Face ID module, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, and earpiece speaker to the new display. Then running calibration through Apple’s Repair Assistant. Then verifying True Tone, testing the touchscreen across its entire surface, checking Face ID functionality, and testing the water resistance seal. A “simple” screen replacement involves 15-20 distinct steps and typically takes 30-45 minutes of focused work — longer if anything doesn’t calibrate first time.

Laptop repairs can be more involved still. A customer brings in a MacBook that won’t turn on. That’s not a diagnosis — that’s a symptom with potentially dozens of causes. The technician works through them systematically: visual inspection under a microscope, thermal imaging to find hot spots, multimeter readings across the board, cross-referencing schematics. Sometimes the first hypothesis is wrong and the second one is too. That diagnostic time is real work, and it has to be reflected in the price.

Our labour rate is currently £85 per hour. That’s the unit we use to calculate service pricing, multiplied by the estimated time a repair requires. Here’s what that rate covers: the technician’s wages and employment costs, tax, rent on our London workshop space, utilities, consumable supplies used during repairs, the software tools we need to run the business, a margin that keeps the company viable for its owner, and a portion set aside for reinvestment — training, equipment, growth. None of those components are optional. Remove any one, and either the quality drops or the business stops existing.

The Risk You Don’t See on the Invoice

Some repairs carry inherent risk that has nothing to do with the technician’s skill.

Replacing a battery in many newer phones means going through the screen — because the display is glued down and there’s no other way in. Screens can crack during removal, especially older or already-damaged ones. When that happens, we take responsibility. That risk has a real cost, and in many cases we absorb it into the repair price rather than passing it on as a surprise afterwards.

We have two options when this applies: include it in the quote silently, or explain the risk to the customer upfront and let them decide. We chose transparency. We tell you: “There’s a chance the screen could crack during this repair. Here’s what that would cost if it happens.”

We know this sometimes makes our quotes look more complicated — or more expensive — than a competitor who doesn’t mention the risk at all. Some shops simply don’t raise it. If everything goes well, the customer never knows. If something goes wrong, that’s when the conversation happens. We’d rather have the conversation before you’ve committed, not after.

The Equipment Behind the Bench

You see a technician with a screwdriver. You don’t see what’s behind them.

Component-level diagnostics and repair require professional-grade equipment: microscopes, precision soldering stations, thermal imaging cameras, ultrasonic cleaners, regulated power supplies, screen testing rigs, and — for data recovery — specialist hardware like the PC3000 system that can interface directly with damaged storage media.

This equipment represents a significant investment that’s amortised across every repair we do. A shop without this kit can do simpler repairs at a lower price. But it can’t diagnose a short-circuited capacitor on a logic board, and it can’t recover data from a mechanically failed hard drive. The price difference between shops often reflects the difference in what they can actually do — not just what they charge for the same job.

What a Cheaper Quote Usually Means

This isn’t an attack on other shops. It’s a framework for comparing quotes.

A lower price might mean: a lower-tier replacement part, less time spent on diagnostics, no calibration after the repair, no testing of water resistance seals, no warranty, or a business model with lower overhead. Any of those can be perfectly fine depending on what you need. A budget screen on a phone you’re replacing in six months might be the right call.

But if you’re comparing quotes, compare like for like. Ask what part is being used. Ask about warranty. Ask whether calibration is included. Ask what happens if something goes wrong during the repair. The cheapest quote and the best value are often different things.

Where This Leaves Us

We’re not the cheapest repair shop in London. We don’t try to be.

Our pricing reflects the time of skilled technicians, the cost of quality parts, the equipment required to do the job properly, and the honesty to tell you about risks before you encounter them. It also reflects a deliberate shift in our business: increasingly, the work that comes to us is the work that requires real diagnostic skill, complex board-level repair, and advanced capabilities that fewer shops offer. That’s where our investment goes, and that’s what our pricing supports.

If a repair makes financial sense, we’ll do it well. If it doesn’t — if the cost is too close to the value of the device — we’ll tell you that directly. We’d rather lose a repair job than have you regret paying for one.