Hard drive data rescue services

Inspired by the question Crashed Hard Drive Data Retrieval which is currently concentrating on software tools and self-help methods of data rescue, I am curious what the community's experiences are with data rescue services. These are companies that attempt to deal with drives that have survived fires, floods, or other physical damage.

My one experience with a provider was positive in that they seemed like they did make a good faith attempt to get data from the drive, but they failed to get any data. They confirmed our diagnosis of a head crash, and incidentally our fervent belief in backups. They charged a moderate fee for the attempt, and we let them simply recycle the drive on failure.

So the question is this: are there any success and/or horror stories out there to share?

I have had reasonable success with OnTrack. I have probably had to resort to them maybe 5 times in the last 20 years? They are not cheap, and not infallible, but they have managed to save the day 3 out of those 5 times...

I've been involved in the use of commercial data recovery services once, and the experience was much the same as yours -- they tried, charged a reasonable amount of money, didn't really get too far (and by the time they did their thing, the data was too stale to have been much use).

I like data recovery companies and their high prices -- it makes it easier to convince people that backups aren't all that expensive after all.