A new DualSense is around £60. Fixing a drifting one is £19 for a single stick, £24 for both. On price alone that's not close.
But price isn't the whole question, so here's the honest version of both sides.
The case for repairing
The obvious one is cost. £19 against £60 is roughly a third, and the repair comes with a 12-month warranty on the work — the same length as the warranty on a brand new pad.
The less obvious one is that a new controller has exactly the same sticks in it. Potentiometer modules, same design, same wear mechanism, same failure in another few hundred hours of play. Buying a new one doesn't solve the problem, it resets the clock on it.
There's also the pad itself. If yours has a shell you like, a colourway that's been discontinued, or you've simply got used to how it feels, a repair keeps it. A replacement doesn't.
The case for replacing
There are real ones.
If the controller has more wrong with it than drift — a cracked shell, a failing battery, dead triggers, a damaged charging port — then fixing only the sticks leaves you with a pad that's still on its way out. Several faults at once usually means replacing is the better spend.
If it's a spare that sits in a drawer and gets used twice a year, £19 to fix something you barely touch is harder to justify than living with it.
And if it's genuinely ancient and beaten up, at some point a repair is money into something that's going to fail somewhere else regardless. That's a judgement call, and I'll tell you honestly if I think yours is at that point.
The option that changes the maths
The comparison above treats repair as a temporary fix, because with standard sticks it partly is — you're putting in a new part that wears the same way.
The Hall effect upgrade at £34 doesn't. Contactless magnetic sticks have no wear surface, so drift is far less likely to come back. At that point you're not comparing a £19 patch against a £60 replacement — you're comparing a £34 upgrade — or £39 for TMR — against a £60 controller that will drift again eventually.
That's the comparison worth making, and it's covered properly in Hall effect vs standard sticks.
What about the environmental bit
A DualSense is a few hundred grams of plastic, lithium and rare-earth metals, and the part that failed is worth about £3. Throwing the other £57 of it away because of that is hard to defend, and it's most of the reason I do this work at all.
But I'd rather make the case on the price, because the price makes it on its own.
The short answer
If drift is the only thing wrong with it, repair it. If several things are wrong, replace it. If you've repaired it once already and it's drifted again, upgrade it and stop paying for the same fault.
See what it costs, or book the repair and post it in.
