A practical second opinion.

TopOrHop combines the obvious — repair cost vs replacement cost — with the things that usually get forgotten:

• How much useful life the item has left
• How reliable that brand and category typically are
• Whether the warranty is still valid
• Delivery, installation and disposal of the new unit
• Energy use over the remaining lifespan
• The embodied CO₂ of replacing perfectly good hardware

The output is a 0–100 Repair Score, a clear recommendation, and a plain-English explanation of which factors moved the needle.

Most "repair vs replace" advice online boils down to a heuristic from the 1980s: "if the repair is more than half the new price, replace it." That ignores lifespan, reliability, the environmental cost of replacement, and the actual price you would pay today for an equivalent unit.

We built TopOrHop because we couldn't find a tool that took all of this into account, showed its working, and never tried to sell us the replacement.

The decision engine weighs nine factors with documented weights: cost ratio, expected remaining lifespan, brand reliability, warranty status, fault type, energy efficiency delta, urgency, environmental impact and overall sentiment of your situation.

Replacement prices come from live shopping listings via PricesAPI. Outliers and unreliable sellers are excluded; the median of the remaining offers is used as the benchmark. Daily snapshots are stored so you can see the trend rather than a single moment.

The full breakdown — including weights, formulas and confidence rules — lives on the methodology page.

• PricesAPI — live shopping offers, used for replacement benchmark prices.
• Category lifespan tables — based on published appliance industry data and consumer-protection studies.
• Energy use defaults — derived from EU energy label datasets (kWh/year by class).
• Reliability priors — aggregated from public repairability reports and consumer surveys.
• Your own inputs — repair quote, age, warranty status, observed faults.

This is the honest part. TopOrHop does not know:

• Your specific unit's history — how it was used, abused or serviced.
• Whether your repair shop quote is competitive in your local market. Always get a second quote on jobs over €200.
• Hidden damage. A €120 quote sometimes becomes €350 once the technician opens the case.
• Safety conditions specific to your installation — gas leaks, damaged wiring, water damage. These override our recommendation.
• Sentimental value. If you love it, that's a valid reason to repair.

Treat the recommendation as a strong second opinion, not a verdict.

We may earn a small commission on some replacement offers shown in market snapshots. Two design choices keep this clean:

• The repair-or-replace recommendation is calculated before any offer is loaded. Affiliate links cannot affect it.
• Offers are scored on price + seller reliability, not commission rate. The "best value" pick is the one that scores best for the user, not the highest payout.