Pay Once, Redo It Free: What a Re-test or Re-wipe Costs in reCore

Count the second attempts on your floor for a week. A laptop fails its battery test, gets a new battery and gets tested again. A wipe drops out at 60% and gets restarted. A buyer asks for a stricter grade and a whole lot gets graded twice.

None of that is waste. It's what careful work looks like. So it shouldn't cost you twice.

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1. Every redo, and what it costs

Here's one laptop with one drive, over its first 30 days in reCore.

So that laptop costs 3 operations in its first month (the device and its two drives), however many times it goes round your floor. What one operation costs depends on your plan; see pricing.

2. A lot, worked through

Say a lot of 100 laptops comes in, one drive each.

• Every laptop is tested and wiped: 200 operations.
• 12 fail the battery test, get new batteries and are re-tested: 0 more.
• 5 wipes drop out and are restarted: 0 more. Each drive is charged once, when its wipe finishes.
• 3 drives finish but fail their read-back check, and are wiped again: 0 more. Their first run was already in the 200.
• The buyer asks for the whole lot to be re-graded: 0 more.

The lot costs 200 operations. If every test and wipe attempt were a charge, the same week would cost 220 before counting the re-grade, and the 20 extra would be for the most careful work you did.

3. Why we charge for a wipe that fails its check

This is the one rule people don't expect, so here's the reasoning.

A wipe that finishes and fails its check still did the work. It ran, it read the drive back, and it left a record saying the drive isn't clean yet. That record is worth having: it's why the drive gets wiped again instead of shipping.

The bigger reason is trust. If we only got paid when a check passed, we'd have a reason to make checks easier to pass. We don't want that incentive anywhere near the thing that proves a drive is clean. So a finished wipe costs the same whether it passes or fails, and the retry is free.

A wipe that doesn't finish is different. It errored out or someone stopped it, so there's nothing to charge for.

4. Why 30 days, not forever

Thirty days covers a lot's real life on a floor: intake, testing, repairs, wiping, grading, a buyer's second look. Redo anything inside that window and it's free.

A laptop that comes back three months later is usually a new job: a new lot, sometimes a new owner, and a new record. That's real new work, so it's a new charge. The window runs from each device's or drive's own charge, not from the start of your billing month, so a laptop that arrives on the 29th still gets its full 30 days.

5. Questions to ask any vendor

Ask them before you compare prices:

1. Does a re-test of the same device use another license?
2. Does a wipe that fails or is cancelled use a license?
3. Is the retry another license?
4. Is re-grading charged?
5. For how long is the same device covered?

We wrote more about this in what data erasure software really costs.

Conclusion

Second attempts are part of doing the job well. In reCore you pay once per device and once per drive, and every redo for the next 30 days is free. Every plan and price is public on the pricing page, and the free trial needs no card.

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Sources

• Billing rules: reCore's billing service, checked in code on 2026-10-20. One operation per device and one per drive; each charge covers that device or drive for 30 days (the live billing API reports the same window). A wipe is charged only when it completes; a completed wipe is charged whatever its verification result.
• Example laptop and lot figures are illustrations, not a customer's numbers.