Keep Above
Repair or replace the phone
A phone with a cracked screen or a fading battery has the same two ways forward as anything else that breaks: repair it or replace it. Enter what the fix would cost and the extra time it would buy, against a replacement and its own span — each lands on a cost per year. No winner is declared; every figure is your estimate.
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Your estimate, not the page's
Not counted while this is $0
Comes off the replacement
Put in what the fix would cost and what a replacement would cost. Nothing here is read from your accounts, and nothing is saved.
| Repairing | Replacing | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | — | — |
| Running costs over its life | — | — |
| Total over its life | — | — |
| How long that covers | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
About this calculator
What counts as the repair cost for a phone?
The full price of the repair — screen, battery or charging port, plus labour where it's charged. The cost per year divides that whole amount by the extra time you think the fix would buy, so the complete figure is the one that fits.
What goes into running costs a year here?
Insurance, a case, the repairs you'd expect along the way — running costs are whatever it would take per year beyond the purchase or repair itself. The same kinds of costs belong on both sides; a box at $0 isn't counted.
What is the matching time?
The number of years the repair would have to carry the phone for its cost per year to match the replacement's — a position in the arithmetic, nothing more. When running the old one already costs more each year than the whole replacement does all-up, no length of time would match, and the page says so.
What about selling the old one?
Whatever the old phone would fetch — a sale, a trade-in on the new one, or parts — comes off the replacement's cost. The up-front figure can't go below zero, but the lifetime total can: an old handset worth more than the replacement genuinely pulls it down.