Nobody publishes a price for IT asset disposition because the same pallet can cost you money or pay you money. Two-year-old laptops have resale value. Eight-year-old desktops have processing cost. A quote is the net of those two things, which is why it arrives as a conversation rather than a page.
TL;DR
- Disposal quotes are the net of a processing cost and a resale credit, so the same service can be a bill or a payment.
- Four things set the number: volume, age and material mix, geography, and the level of evidence you need.
- Ask for the processing fee and the resale credit as separate lines. A single net figure cannot be compared to anything.
- Missing chargers, activation locks and no serial manifest are the three things that collapse a quote most often.
- Get every quote against one manifest you wrote, not against each vendor’s description of your fleet.
- Ask for certification numbers and expiry dates rather than logos, and check them yourself.
Why there is no list price
A disposal vendor is running two businesses at once. One processes material it cannot sell, which costs labour, transport and recycling fees. The other refurbishes and resells what it can, which generates revenue it may share with you.
Your quote is the difference between those two, and the difference depends entirely on what is in the batch. A vendor cannot publish a figure for that any more than a scrap merchant can publish a figure for a skip, because the contents are the price.
So the useful thing is not to hunt for a benchmark. It is to understand the four inputs well enough to make three quotes comparable, and to know which of your own habits are destroying the resale half of the equation.
The four things that set the number
| Volume | Pallets are cheap per unit, single devices are not | A collection is a van and a driver whether it holds 4 machines or 40 |
| Age and material mix | Decides whether you are paying or being paid | Recent laptops carry value. Monitors, desktops and anything over about five years usually do not |
| Geography | Where the kit is, not where you are | Distributed devices in homes across several countries is a different service from one loading bay |
| Evidence level | What you need to prove afterwards | A certificate per batch is cheap. A certificate per serial with a data destruction record is not |
The fourth row is the one buyers underestimate. The physical work of destroying a drive is not where the cost sits for a reputable vendor. The cost sits in tracking each serial through the process and producing a document somebody will accept, and that is a service level you choose rather than a property of the hardware.
The three commercial shapes
A fee. You pay per unit, per pallet or by weight, and the vendor keeps whatever resale value exists. Simple, predictable, and the worst deal when your fleet is young, because you are giving away the valuable half.
Revenue share. The vendor resells and pays you a proportion, with processing costs deducted. Better for a young fleet and harder to verify, since you are trusting somebody else’s figure for what a machine sold for. Ask how the resale value is determined and whether you receive a per-serial statement.
Net settlement. The two are offset and you get one number, which may be in either direction. The most common arrangement and the hardest to compare, because a single net figure hides both inputs and two vendors can reach the same net from very different assumptions.
So ask every vendor for the fee and the credit as separate lines even where they quote net. A vendor who will not separate them is telling you something about how the number was built.
What collapses a quote
Three things, all of them within your control, and each one can turn a credit into a bill.
Activation locks and unreleased management enrolment. A machine still enrolled in your device management, or carrying an activation lock, cannot be resold by anybody. It becomes material rather than a product, which removes its entire value and moves it into the processing column. Releasing devices on arrival is the single highest-value habit in this whole area.
Missing power supplies and accessories. A laptop without its charger is worth measurably less than one with it, and chargers are the item most reliably lost during recovery. Asking departing staff for the charger by name, rather than for company equipment, closes most of this.
No serial manifest. Without a list, the vendor counts what arrives and you have no way to dispute it, no per-serial certificate and no reconciliation against your own register. This is the one that makes a quote uncomparable rather than low.
A worked example
A company collected 94 devices over two years and asked three vendors for a quote. The three numbers differed by more than a factor of two and the company spent a fortnight trying to work out why.
The cause was that each vendor had been given a different description. One had been told the laptop count only. One had walked the storeroom and seen the monitors and the two pallets of desktops. One had asked for ages and discovered that 31 of the machines were over six years old. Three honest vendors had quoted three different jobs.
On a single manifest listing every serial with its model and age, the three quotes came back within a narrow band. The second finding was more useful: 22 machines were still enrolled in device management and therefore unsellable, and releasing them moved the whole batch from a bill to roughly break-even.
Comparing quotes properly
What to do:
- Write one manifest yourself: serial, model, year, condition, and whether the charger is present.
- Send the identical manifest to every vendor and ask them to quote against it rather than describe your fleet back to you.
- Ask for the processing fee and the resale credit as separate lines, even where the quote is net.
- Ask what happens to items with no resale value, and whether that cost is capped.
- Release every device from management and clear activation locks before the collection, not after the quote.
- Ask for certification numbers with expiry dates, and verify them with the issuing body yourself.
The last point is worth doing rather than assuming. Logos on a website are not evidence, and a certification that lapsed eighteen months ago looks identical to a current one on a footer. What any particular standard obliges a vendor to do, and what you are required to hold, differs by jurisdiction and by circumstance, so take local advice on your own position rather than relying on a vendor’s summary.
Blancco is the best-known option where you want to perform certified erasure yourself and keep the hardware, and it is quote-based rather than published. The disposal specialists are compared in our IT asset disposition comparison.
Final thoughts
There is no list price for disposal and there is not going to be one, because the contents of the batch are the price. That is not evasion on the vendors’ part, it is the shape of the business.
What you control is most of the number. Write one manifest, release every device from management, keep the chargers, and insist on seeing the fee and the credit separately. Do those four things and three quotes become comparable, which is as close to a market price as this category offers.
Frequently asked questions
Why do ITAD vendors not publish prices?
Because the quote is the net of two opposing things: the cost of processing material that cannot be sold, and the revenue from refurbishing and reselling what can. A batch of recent laptops can be worth money to you, while a pallet of old desktops and monitors costs money to handle. The contents set the price, so a published figure would be meaningless. Vendors quote on a manifest for the same reason a scrap merchant cannot price a skip in advance.
What drives the cost of IT disposal?
Four things. Volume, because a collection costs a van and a driver whether it holds four machines or forty. Age and material mix, which decides whether you are paying or being paid. Geography, meaning whether the kit sits in one loading bay or in homes across several countries. And the level of evidence you need, since a certificate per batch is cheap while a certificate per serial with a data destruction record is a different service level entirely.
Should you take a fee or a revenue share?
A revenue share generally suits a young fleet, since paying a flat fee means giving away the resale value of machines that still have some. A fee suits an older fleet where there is little to share and predictability is worth more. The practical difficulty with revenue share is verification, because you are accepting somebody else’s figure for what each machine sold for, so ask whether you receive a per-serial statement and how the resale value is determined.
What makes a disposal quote worse than it should be?
Three things, all within your control. Devices still enrolled in management or carrying an activation lock cannot be resold by anybody, which removes their whole value and moves them into the processing column. Missing power supplies reduce a laptop’s resale value measurably, and chargers are the item most often lost during recovery. And no serial manifest means the vendor counts what arrives, leaving you with no basis to dispute anything and no per-serial certificate.
How do you compare quotes from different disposal vendors?
Write one manifest yourself, listing serial, model, year, condition and whether the charger is present, then send the identical document to every vendor and ask them to quote against it. Three vendors given three different descriptions of the same fleet will produce three unrelated numbers, which is usually why quotes appear to differ wildly. Then ask each for the processing fee and the resale credit as separate lines, because a single net figure cannot be compared to anything.
How do you check a vendor’s certifications?
Ask for the certificate number and its expiry date rather than accepting a logo, then verify it directly with the issuing body. A certification that lapsed eighteen months ago looks identical to a current one in a website footer, and the check takes a few minutes. What any particular standard obliges a vendor to do, and what you are required to hold yourself, differs by jurisdiction and circumstance, so take local advice on your own position rather than relying on a vendor’s description of it.
