Realized corrupt drive had warranty, might pay $1000 for nothing

I made a post earlier about my 16 TB drive that was corrupt/failed which I handed in to a data recovery expert (smaller one man company). He managed to recover a lot and quoted me $1000 (minimum, then I gotta pay for new drive etc). I'm grateful that he managed to do it, but it's still a lot of money.

Someone in the comments pointed out that Seagate has some warranty where they can recover your data for free. I looked it up and my drive is covered... a little too late.

So I'm not sure what I should do now.

A) Tell Seagate about the situation and maybe they can compensate me some other way, new hard drive? Although they may claim that since someone worked on it (opened it up I believe) warranty no longer stands?

B) Tell the recovery guy that I realized I have a warranty in which case I could "pull out" and only pay $100. I'm afraid if he then deletes my files and Seagate isn't able to recover them, I would lose it all.
Maybe if he keeps them just in case Seagate fail and only then I could pay $1000. Is that weird to expect?