iFixit gives repair guides away free and makes money selling the parts

iFixit began with a specific frustration: Kyle Wiens broke the power port on his Apple iBook at Cal Poly in 2003 and could not find a repair guide anywhere. He and fellow student Luke Soules wrote a step-by-step guide themselves, posted it online, and watched the traffic arrive. They launched iFixit from their dorm room with the unusual rule that the information would always be free.

The business model inverted the usual logic of a how-to site. Instead of paywalling guides or selling advertising, iFixit made its wiki-style repair manuals, teardowns and repairability scores into a public good, and earned money from the physical side of repair: replacement parts, tools and kits. As the Darden School case later summarised, the company was built on creating more value than it captured.

Over nearly two decades iFixit's guides came to cover more than 30,000 devices, while its teardowns of new gadgets — and its 1-to-10 repairability scores — made it the evidence base for the right-to-repair movement. Wiens spent about ten years on legislation and testimony, pushing manufacturers to share parts, schematics and service information with owners and independent shops.

The patient strategy eventually worked on the industry itself. After years of fighting repair rights, manufacturers began signing with iFixit to sell official parts: Motorola first, then Google, Samsung and Valve. As Wiens told The Verge in 2022, iFixit's guides and purpose-built tools made manufacturers confident that do-it-yourself repairs would not turn into support disasters.