Warranty labor never appears in a budget. It is not a line item anywhere. It is a slice of three people's weeks: the CX lead working out whether a two-year-old order is still covered, the ops person chasing a photo of a serial number, the founder pulled in when a customer escalates for the second time. None of that lands in a report. It shows up as everyone being slightly busier than they should be, in a way nobody can attribute to anything.
It has no owner either. Warranty is almost never somebody's job. It is the thing attached to somebody's job, under “other duties as assigned,” which means the person absorbing it has no standing to ask for budget and no numbers to ask with.
Which is why it never gets fixed. A cost you cannot see is a cost you cannot make a case against.
So here is the number, and a way to work out your own.
Claims processing has been benchmarked, and the spread is not subtle.
- Manual and legacy: $35–50+ per claim, with a cycle time of 7–14 days.
- Industry average, with a system: $15–25 per claim, 3–5 days.
- Top performers: $5–10 per claim, under 24 hours.
“Manual and legacy” is defined in the source as spreadsheets, email-based workflows, and outdated systems with minimal automation. If your warranty runs on a form, a spreadsheet, and an inbox, that is the row you are on. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Because nobody ever decided warranty needed a system, and it grew anyway.
The part that makes this actionable: labor is 60–70% of processing cost. That is the mechanism, not an assumption. The money is not going on software, because you are not buying any. It is going on people reading threads, looking things up, and typing the same answer again.
Three numbers, and you already have the first one.
Claims per month. Cost per claim now. Cost per claim with a system.
Take a brand handling 200 claims a month. Call the current cost $40 a claim, which sits in the lower half of the manual band. Call the cost with a system $20, the middle of the industry average. That is a $20 difference on every claim, $4,000 a month, and roughly $48,000 a year.
Forty-eight thousand dollars is a hire. It is not a rounding error, and it has been sitting inside a process nobody was measuring.
The same benchmark runs the number at scale: WarrantyHub puts an organization processing 3,000 claims a month at nearly $470,000 a year saving, moving from $20 to $7 per claim. Worth knowing the shape of, but treat that bottom figure carefully. Seven dollars is top-performer territory and assumes a degree of automation we would not promise you on day one. The arithmetic above stops at $20 on purpose.
One thing worth being precise about, because the category is usually vague here. “With a system” does not mean claims resolve themselves. It means the claim arrives structured instead of as an email, coverage is checked against the order rather than looked up by hand, and the history is on the record instead of in somebody's memory. Your team still decides every claim. They just stop doing the twenty minutes of assembly that came before the decision.
And we will not invent your claim volume for you. It is the biggest number in the calculation, and it is the one we cannot know.
Count your warranty tickets, multiply by ten minutes, and you will get a number far too small. Three things go missing, and they are the expensive ones.
The lookup. Before anyone answers anything, somebody has to establish whether the unit is covered at all. When was it bought, what did the policy say at the time, was that written down anywhere, and does the version on the product page match the one in the PDF. That work happens before the claim is even a claim, it happens on every single one, and it produces nothing reusable. The next person to get the same question about the same product starts over.
The second email. A customer who cannot see a status will ask for one. Then ask again. Every one of those is a person reopening a thread, rereading it to remember where things stood, and composing a reply that contains no new information.
The escalation that is really a memory problem. A claim gets escalated because nobody can remember what was promised, and the person who promised it is in a different thread, or on leave, or gone. The escalation is not about the product. It is about the record not existing.
None of those are tickets. All of them are labor. The gap between $40 and $20 is almost entirely made of them.
The per-claim figure is the one you can put in a spreadsheet. The other column in that benchmark is time, and it runs 7–14 days manually against 3–5 with a system.
That difference does not show up in payroll. It shows up in whether the customer comes back.
Roughly 71% of consumers say they are less likely to shop with a retailer again after a poor post-purchase experience, up from 67% the year before, and four in five tell somebody else about it. Meanwhile acquisition costs are up 60–80% since 2021, which is what makes this worth arithmetic rather than sentiment: the customer you lose in a claim has to be replaced at today's prices, not the prices you were paying when you acquired them.
We are not going to hand you an attribution percentage here. Anyone who tells you that a warranty system retains a specific share of your at-risk customers has invented the number. What we would say instead: work it against your own cost to acquire a customer, applied to your own claim volume, and decide for yourself what a saved one is worth. Use gross margin rather than revenue when you do. DTC gross margins tend to run 55–65%, and a value case built on top-line revenue falls apart the moment a CFO reads it.
The honest version is that the labor number is the one you can defend in a meeting. The retention number is the one that is probably larger.
warrantini is $49–399 a month, flat. No per-claim fee, no metering, no revenue share, so the number does not move when a bad batch ships and your claim volume triples.
Set that against $48,000 and the comparison is not close. Which is the point, and also the reason to be careful with it: the software is the cheap part of this, and the cheap part is not the hard part.
Connecting your store and publishing the portal takes an afternoon. Writing down what your warranty actually covers takes longer, because most companies have it in three places that do not agree. Deciding who reviews, who approves, and what escalates takes longer still. Those are decisions about your own business, and we help with all of it at no charge, because there are no services here to sell you.
The trial is 14 days, no card. But before any of that, run the three numbers. Even if you never buy anything, you will know what the current arrangement costs, which is more than you knew this morning.