Before you replace something expensive, check what it is actually worth
TechWorth is a UK decision engine for the technology you already own. It works out whether keeping it, repairing it, replacing the battery, buying refurbished, buying new, selling it or simply waiting leaves you better off — and shows you the figures it used to decide.
The answers it can give
Every option is evaluated on the same footing and ranked. None of them is the house favourite.
Keep it
The device still does what you need and nothing is worth spending. Frequently the right answer, and the one that earns us nothing.
Replace the battery
Often the cheapest way to make an older phone feel new, and the option people skip because nobody advertises it.
Repair it
A screen or a port costs a fraction of a replacement — until it does not, and the point at which that flips is a calculation rather than a feeling.
Buy refurbished
A generation or two back, at a large discount, with a warranty. Compared like for like against new rather than assumed to be better.
Buy new
Sometimes the honest answer, particularly when the old device has no supported life left in it.
Sell or trade in
What the device is worth to somebody else, weighed against what it is still worth to you.
Wait
Prices move, and September moves them a lot. Occasionally the best thing to do is nothing, for a stated length of time.
How it decides
The comparison is cost per useful month. A cheap repair that buys another year or two of a device you already like can be better value than a replacement costing many times more and lasting only a little longer, and the only way to see which is which is to put both on the same axis. Deliberately, that figure can come out negative: an upgrade really can cost more per useful month than doing nothing, and rounding that away would hide the answer people most need.
The engine also says how confident it is, and it is honest about why. Confidence is a property of what it was told, not of how tidy the answer looks: a precise-looking result computed from a battery health figure you did not know is a confident-looking guess, and it is labelled as one.
Where a figure cannot be sourced, no figure is shown. An option that we cannot cost returns a note saying so rather than a plausible estimate, because a plausible invented number is indistinguishable from a real one to the person reading it. How we work it out sets out the whole method.
Every number has a source and a date
No price, repair cost, depreciation rate or support estimate is typed into this site. Each one is a database row carrying where it came from and when it was last checked, and the page shows you both. That is the point of the whole exercise: a figure you cannot trace is a figure you cannot check. Where our figures come from lists what we use and the order we prefer them in.
The recommendation cannot see the commission
We earn a commission on some links to shops. The incentive that creates points the wrong way — refurbished pays several times what a new handset does, and “keep your phone and replace the battery” pays almost nothing — so the correct answer is often the one that pays us least.
Rather than promise not to be swayed by that, the code is built so it cannot be. The component that decides the recommendation has no access to commission data at all, shops are chosen only after the outcome is settled, and an automated test fails the build if that boundary is ever crossed. How we make money explains it in full.
What you can do today
Browse phones, tablets and laptops we have sourced specifications for, read the guides, or answer a few questions about a device you already own. Shop listings appear beside a recommendation only when we have actually observed an offer from a joined retail programme. WeBuyAnyPhone, Envirofone and Grade Mobile selling quotes are live as affiliate links on product pages; we do not print a selling price until we have observed one.
About TechWorth says who is behind it, and contact is the fastest way to reach us — including to tell us a figure is wrong, which is more useful to us than being right about the rest.