Repair or replace your phone?
Work out whether repairing, replacing the battery, or changing the phone makes sense — starting with the free explanations that get mistaken for an old phone.
Answer the battery and storage questions to get started. A repair quote and a replacement price turn the answer into arithmetic rather than a judgement.
Not enough to say anything yet
Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.
Nothing has been entered that can be turned into an answer. Every tool here works from figures you supply, and none of them will guess on your behalf.
What to try, all free
Look up what you actually used
Both Android and iOS keep a running total of mobile data, and your network shows the last few months in its app. That record beats every estimate on this page — use this tool to sanity-check it, not to replace it.
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Three cheap explanations, checked first
“My phone is getting old” is usually a description of three specific things, and two of them have fixes costing a fraction of a replacement.
Storage. A phone with no free space slows down, stops updating and stops backing up. Together those feel exactly like a device at the end of its life, and the fix is moving photos off it.
The battery. A worn battery shortens the day, and on some phones makes the whole device slower, because the software throttles performance to avoid unexpected shutdowns as the battery ages. A replacement costs a small fraction of a new phone.
Software support. The one genuine reason to replace a working phone, and the one that is not really about money.
This tool checks them in that order — cheapest first — and the first two reach conclusions that carry no suggestion of buying a handset at all.
Battery health, if your phone reports it
Most phones show a battery health percentage in their settings. Manufacturers generally treat 80% as the point at which a battery is due for service, and it is where capacity warranties usually stop. If yours reports a figure, use it — a measurement beats an impression, and this tool weighs it accordingly.
On security updates, we take your word
We do not ask for your model and we could not verify it if we did. Whether a specific device still receives security updates is a fact published by its manufacturer, it differs by model and by region, and published support windows have generally been getting longer rather than shorter.
So this tool never asserts that your phone is out of support. If you tell it so, it treats that as something you reported, says so in the result, and sends you to the manufacturer’s own support page to confirm before it decides anything. Telling somebody their phone is unsafe when it is not is a bad enough error to be worth structuring the tool around avoiding.
Cost per year, not cost
A £65 battery that buys two more years and a £700 phone that lasts four are not comparable as prices. Per year of use they are £32.50 and £175, and that is the comparison worth making.
This is also why a repair quote is the single most useful thing to have before deciding. It is free to ask for, and it turns the whole question from a judgement into arithmetic. A cheap repair that buys six months can easily be worse value than replacing; a moderate one that buys three years rarely is.
If the answer is to replace it
Work out how, before working out what. Buying a handset outright and pairing it with a SIM-only plan is frequently cheaper across the ownership period than the bundled contract offering the same phone, and the SIM-only versus contract comparison costs all four routes over the same months.