My phone is disabled, please help me.

Okay recently, I forgot my passcode to my phone and I disabled myself out from my phone. I started to look online on how to restore my iphone, but I couldn’t get to restore it. Everytime I connect it to itunes and send my phone to recovery mode, itunes doesn’t seem to connect to it. It says an error message that something was wrong, but the thing is…I don’t know what. . I don’t know if it’s because my laptop is not a macbook, do you have to have macbook in order to recover your phone? Well, I also tried recovering my phone another way which is by doing the Find My Iphone option to erase all data. It didn’t work because when I went into my icloud and I searched for my device and it was offline… It sucks because I’m locked out of my phone and can’t connect it back to the wifi to fix the problem. I don’t know what to do… I’m not going to be able to get a phone for a long time. I was thinking of just going to the apple store, but I didn’t buy my phone from there. Would it also take money if I do end up going to the apple store and they help me unlock it? Are there any other ways?