You don’t “need” to pay for a third party recovery service if you are willing to invest a little time and effort (if you have a desktop computer that has SATA connectors, or have SATA external USB drive/connector). As mentioned above one can pull the hard drive from the My Cloud enclosure and access it with a Linux operating system (or use a Linux Boot Disc).
The fact is that most if not all hard drive manufactures will not cover the cost of recovering data from a damaged hard drive, WD included. At most they’ll replace the drive/NAS under warranty. Fact is that hard drives can and do die which is why it is recommended one have multiple backups of sensitive data, that includes backing up the My Cloud to another location/USB drive for just this sort of situation. One can backup the My Cloud using Safepoint (v3.x/v4.x firmware) or Backup (v2.x firmware).
If one does a forum search using the terms “recovery” or “data recovery” they will find several threads discussing methods and ways to attempt data recovery from the hard drive. Here are just a few recent threads:
https://community.wd.com/t/mycloud-is-dead-and-need-to-recover-data/158346
https://community.wd.com/t/how-to-recover-deleted-files/92885
https://community.wd.com/t/my-cloud-my-archive-deleted-by-mistake/159839
