It should have been an easy solution to a straightforward problem: Lucas Brown’s $530 headphones had gone silent, and his extended warranty was supposed to cover the repairs.Every month for three years, the recent college graduate from Massachusetts had been paying $16.99 for Asurion Complete Protect through Amazon. This plan promised to cover repairs or replacements for almost any Amazon purchase, whether due to defects or accidental damage, as long as he kept up with the monthly premium.Brown’s pricey Beyerdynamic headphones were the first product that he had made a claim on. But over the next month, he tried to get them repaired four times, without success.At Asurion’s instruction, Brown kept shipping the headphones to the same third-party repair center near Buffalo, New York. Every time he sent them in, he received the same brief form-letter email from Asurion, which said that the center had tested the headphones but found nothing wrong and were sending them back to him.“It was so frustrating,” Brown said. The deadness of his headset should have been obvious to anyone who had bothered to plug them into any audio system. So Brown tried to make his point to whoever needed to hear it, every way that he could think of: calling Asurion’s customer service team (on multiple occasions), calling the repair facility directly, and even including handwritten notes in his later shipments, asking whoever opened it to please, just try to listen to some music.Finally, after he submitted two videos demonstrating that his headphones were broken — including a clip confirming that a wire inside one of the earcups was disconnected — he was issued a refund, via Amazon gift card, for the original $530 purchase price. The price of the headphones had increased in the 14 months since he had bought them, so the gift card wasn’t quite enough to cover the cost of replacement. The reimbursement was also short of the roughly $610 he had paid for coverage up to that point.Still, Brown, who describes himself as “risk-averse,” continues to pay his monthly premiums for that Asurion plan. “I’ve been wrestling with it, because as soon as you cancel it, all your purchases are void of warranty.” He’d rather have the protection, and he hopes that next time he needs to file a claim, it’ll work out better.And he’s probably right: Numbers are hard to come by, but most people, most of the time, seem to have a much smoother experience with their protection plans than Brown did in this case. When I reached out to Asurion for comment about Brown’s case, the insurer said that 97% of claims made through its Amazon program lead to repairs or reimbursement within 10 days. Brown told me that he’d had plenty of good experiences with other protection plans in the past, too.That said, Wirecutter receives dozens of emails every year from people who have struggled to get their warranties honored. And thousands of stories are posted to platforms like Reddit, Trustpilot, and the Better Business Bureau site by people who say that they’ve been misled or even cheated by their extended-warranty providers.Brown’s case offers a particularly tidy summary of all the ways in which protection plans can fall short of their promises: Even if you manage to avoid or overcome any annoying bureaucratic sludge during the claims process, you typically end up paying more for the coverage than you receive in benefits.Yet even when shoppers are faced with evidence that extended warranties are a losing bet, many still worry that the alternative is worse.It’s a fascinating reminder of something that marketing professionals and social scientists understand deeply: People tend to spend money based on feelings, not logic, especially when they’re caught up in the excitement and anxiety of a big-ticket purchase.The extended-warranty industry, valued at nearly $150 billion globally in 2025 by Grand View Research, serves up protection plans as an outlet for those charged emotions and unconscious biases. They’ve become so lucrative that a cottage industry of warranty consultants and embedded insurance-tech providers has sprung up to make protection plans easier and more enticing to buy — with the explicit goal of increasing revenue for whoever wants to sell them.Depending on how you look at it, extended warranties are either an opportunity to buy some peace of mind or a tax to pay on your psychological vulnerabilities.Perhaps you’ll read these arguments, see the math, and keep paying for AppleCare anyway. Or Geek Squad, or SquareTrade, or any of the dozens of other popular protection plans.That’s up to you. Maybe the sense of ease and equanimity you get from an extended warranty is worth the cost. You might even be the exception to the rule — someone who, against all odds, actually gets their money’s worth from such a plan.But are you sure about that?