A proven $3,400 repair can still be the wrong purchase. This calculator does the keep-or-sell arithmetic the way a dealer’s finance office does it — repair per year of life left versus a year of payments on the next car — except it shows you every rule and how it scored, because the point is not to win the argument. The point is the math.
Free · no email · runs in your browser · nothing uploaded
What the shop quoted for the fix.
Private-party, as-is. A rough KBB number is fine.
Zero if it is paid off.
A real payment — or cash saved, divided by 48 months.
The honest answer, not the hopeful one. Include what else you know is nearing the end.
Do you still trust this car?
The gut answer no calculator asks. Saying no outweighs every ratio.
Waiting on numbers
Fill in the four dollar fields, set the years honestly, and answer the trust question. The verdict builds itself live — nothing is uploaded or saved.
What percent of the whole car is this one fix? Under a quarter, it is cheap insurance. Over the whole value, you are prepaying for a replacement and keeping the old one.
Value minus what you owe is what selling actually leaves you. A repair that costs more than your exit money is paying twice.
Repair cost divided by years of life left, against a year of replacement payments. This is the number the verdict turns on — and it is shown in full.
A fix amortizes against time. Under a year of runway, almost nothing amortizes; over four, almost everything does.
The gut answer. If every drive has become an argument with yourself, the spreadsheet does not get a vote.
This tool assumes the repair is CORRECT. It is not a mechanical opinion — verify the diagnosis before you fund it, either here or with a second opinion.
No — it answers the question that comes AFTER. The savings calculator asks: is this repair overpriced for what it actually is? This page assumes the repair is correctly diagnosed and correctly priced, then asks: does this car still deserve the money? Those are different decisions with different math, and people conflate them at exactly the wrong moment.
The workhorse is payback: take the repair cost, divide by the years of honest life left in the car, and compare that per-year figure against a year of payments on a replacement. Under roughly a third of the payment rate, keep. Over the payment rate, sell. That is the same arithmetic a dealer's F&I office runs against you with a warranty — we just show you the numbers instead of the pitch.
Because a car you do not trust stops being transportation and starts being an argument you have every morning. People who keep a car they have stopped trusting pay for it twice — once in repairs, once in the trip they did not take, the lane change they did not make, the drive they let someone else navigate. If the honest gut answer is no, no ratio redeems it, and the calculator says so.
That is the underwater trap, and the calculator weights it heavily — selling does not clear the difference, you write a check at title and then pay for a replacement on top of it. Sometimes the least-bad move is the repair you did not want, purely to buy time until the loan balance falls below the value. That is a legitimate answer, and it should be made with the math visible, not with dread.
Yes — that is the honest limit of this tool. It scores whether the car deserves the repair, not whether the repair is the right one. A keep verdict on a guessed repair is still a bad purchase. Verify the diagnosis first: a $95 second opinion reads the evidence, names the actual fault, and tells you whether the work order matches the car.
No. The verdict computes in your browser — no account, no email, no server call. Your loan balance, your car, and your kitchen-table argument are nobody's business but yours. Close the tab and it never existed.
A keep decision is only as good as the repair behind it. These are the rest of the path: