The window is about a week
A fresh chip is a clean void. Resin flows into it, bonds properly, and the repair is close to invisible and structurally sound.
After a couple of weeks of road film, rain and dust, that void is packed with contamination. Resin cannot bond into it. The repair goes cloudy, and it is weaker.
After a hot month, it is usually a crack and the decision has been made for you.
The multiple
A resin repair takes about thirty minutes and needs no cure time. A replacement takes 60 to 90 minutes plus cure, uses a part that can cost several hundred dollars, and on a modern car adds a calibration.
The ratio between the two is not close. It is the largest available saving in this entire trade and it is available to anyone who acts quickly.
And the seal
The point people underweight: a repair keeps the factory bond. Whatever the quality of a replacement — and ours are done properly — nothing installed later is as good as glass bonded on the production line in controlled conditions.
Every windshield you do not replace is a seal you do not have to trust anyone to recreate.
So
Tape it today. Call this week. It is thirty minutes at your address and it costs a fraction of the alternative.
Need this done rather than explained? There is no shop to drive to. We come to wherever your car already is — your driveway, your workplace car park, an apartment lot, or the side of the road it stopped on — anywhere in greater Sacramento, with no call-out fee and no mileage charge. Give us the year, make and model and you will have a firm price before the call ends.