A shop that only charges when it succeeds has to make every board a success. There is one way to do that and you would not like it.
A fair question we get asked at the bench: why do I pay four hundred and fifty rufiyaa even when you tell me the phone is finished?
Because the looking is the work. Ninety minutes of it, with the phone opened, the board out, every shield off, the board washed and dried, and then somebody at a microscope going over it section by section. The answer at the end of that, whichever answer it is, took the same ninety minutes to produce.
Now consider the other arrangement, the one customers ask for, where you only pay if it is fixed. Think about what it forces the shop to do. It has to turn every board into a success, because a failure is ninety unpaid minutes. So the incentive is to quote a repair on a board that should have been declared finished, take the money, and hand back a phone that works for a fortnight. We have seen a good number of those come through here afterwards, and the second repair is always harder than the first would have been.
Charging for the assessment separates two things that should never be joined: what we found, and what we would like to sell you. When the answer costs the same either way, the answer can be honest. Perhaps a fifth of the phones on this bench end with us telling somebody not to spend another rufiyaa, and a good few of those people came in ready to spend three thousand.
The assessment also buys something people underrate until they use it: a written note of what was found, which component, and why. It is yours to take anywhere. It stops you paying a third and fourth shop to reach the same conclusion, and once or twice a year somebody takes ours abroad and has the board repaired there. That is a good outcome. We would rather be the shop that told them the truth than the shop that got the job.
One thing this is not. It is not a way of charging for nothing. If the board can be repaired, the assessment fee comes off the repair, so the looking is never paid for twice. And if a component we fitted fails within sixty days, the work is redone at no charge.