Protect Your Bubble Phone Insurance: The Price, The Excess and Who Actually Pays

Affiliate disclosure: we may earn a commission if you take out a product through links on this page. It costs you nothing extra and does not influence how providers are listed.

Protect Your Bubble advertises mobile phone cover from £5.99 a month on an iPhone 17 256GB, and £16.99 a month for any three gadgets on one policy. Both prices were taken from the company's own quote pages on 13 September 2026. Repairs are unlimited, cover is worldwide as standard, and unauthorised calls and data after a theft are met up to £10,000.

The more useful thing about the brand is who is behind it. Protect Your Bubble is a trading name of Assurant General Insurance Limited, firm reference 202735 on the Financial Services Register — which means the company selling the policy is the company underwriting it. There is no broker, no managing general agent and no separate administrator in the chain. That firm has held an insurance licence since 1989, is dual-regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, and says it has insured more than 1.5 million devices across the UK and Ireland since the brand launched in 2008. Defaqto has given the mobile phone policy 5 Stars in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

One eligibility rule decides whether any of this is available to you. The first device on a policy has to be under 12 months old when you buy. Second and later gadgets can be up to 36 months old, but the phone that opens the policy cannot be — so a two-year-old handset has no route in, whatever its condition.

What the monthly price is built from

There is no single price for a phone. Protect Your Bubble quotes on the make, model and storage of the handset, which is why its shop window shows a worked example rather than a rate card: £5.99 a month for an iPhone 17 256GB. That figure carries a condition — it includes a 20% discount available when the phone was bought in the previous 30 days and you are insuring two items or fewer. Buy the policy in month four of owning the handset and the same cover costs more.

The multi-gadget route prices differently again. £16.99 a month covers any three items; each additional gadget after that is £2.50 a month, to a ceiling of 10 devices on one policy. Insuring a second gadget on a two-item policy takes 10% off the total instead. On the three-item price, a household covering a phone, a tablet and a laptop is paying about £5.66 per device per month, which is the arithmetic that makes the bundle worth checking against three separate quotes.

Loss is priced separately, and this is the line most people misread. Damage and mechanical breakdown are in the base policy; theft and loss are optional, and loss costs £1.50 per item per month on top. On the £5.99 phone that is a 25% increase to insure the single event most buyers have in mind when they search. Loss cannot be added to laptops, MacBooks, desktop PCs or PC monitors at any price.

Payment is monthly by Direct Debit, the policy renews itself each month until somebody stops it, and there is a 14-day full-refund window from the day the documents arrive. After those 14 days a cancellation takes effect at the end of the month already paid for, with nothing returned.

The excess ladder, device by device

Protect Your Bubble publishes its excesses in full, on a page of its own, model by model. Not every insurer in this market does, and the document is worth opening before you buy rather than after a screen breaks.

The range on current policies runs from £50 to £150, set by two things at once: which device, and which kind of claim. On an iPhone Pro Max the excess is £100 for damage and £150 for theft or loss. A Pro or Plus model is £100 damage and £125 theft or loss. A standard iPhone is £90 and £100. Older and Mini models drop to £50 to £75 for damage. Samsung follows the same shape: Ultra and Z Fold handsets sit at £100 damage and £150 theft or loss, standard flagships at £75 to £90 damage, and the rest of the range at £50 to £60. Google Pixel Pro and Fold models are £100 damage with £125 to £150 on theft and loss. Away from phones, a MacBook carries £125, a Windows laptop £75, and tablets and iPads £50 to £100. Policies written before 23 November 2016 are on an older and cheaper scale of £25 to £75.

Put the two numbers together and the product comes into focus. Insure a Pro Max at, say, £9.99 a month with loss cover at £1.50 on top, and a stolen handset in month twelve has cost £137.88 in premiums plus a £150 excess — £287.88 before the replacement arrives. That is still well short of the handset, which is the point of the policy. It is also a long way from the impression left by a £5.99 headline, and it is the sum worth doing on your own model before the Direct Debit starts.

One company holds the pen from quote to ombudsman

Phone insurance is usually sold through a chain. A brand takes the money, a second firm administers the policy, a third carries the risk, and the customer discovers the shape of it only when a claim goes wrong. Protect Your Bubble is not built that way. The brand, the underwriter and the claims handler are one legal person: Assurant General Insurance Limited, company number 02341082, registered at Emerald Buildings, Westmere Drive, Crewe.

Companies House puts its incorporation at 30 January 1989, originally as Alnery No. 819 Limited, renamed Bankers Insurance Company Limited later that year and trading under that name until 14 November 2007. The Protect Your Bubble brand arrived in 2008, which makes the marketing 18 years old and the balance sheet behind it 37. Its parent, Assurant, is a Fortune 500 company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Because the risk-carrier is a UK insurer rather than an intermediary, it is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority as well as regulated by the FCA — a higher bar than the FCA-only permission a broker or an administrator holds, and one that brings capital requirements with it. For a buyer it also removes a practical irritation: there is one firm reference number to check, one complaints address, and no argument about which party in a chain owns the problem. Complaints go to 0330 333 4792 or complaints@protectyourbubble.com first, and to the Financial Ombudsman Service at Exchange Tower, London E14 9GE on 0800 023 4567 if eight weeks pass without a resolution you accept.

Repair, replace, and the gap between the two

"Unlimited repairs" is the phrase the marketing leads on and it is accurate as far as it goes. There is no cap on the number of damage or breakdown claims in a year. The limit sits on the other side of the line: two replacements per item in any 12-month period, and separately two successful loss or theft claims per device per 12 months. Whether an incident is repaired or replaced is the insurer's call, not the customer's, so the unlimited half of the promise is the half it controls.

A replacement is refurbished or remanufactured stock, not a new handset. The wording says so plainly. Colour is attempted but not guaranteed, limited editions are not replaced at all, and replacements are posted to UK addresses only — worldwide cover means you are insured abroad, not that a phone will follow you there. What does come with the settlement is a warranty: 180 days against mechanical breakdown on a repair, 365 days on a replacement.

Two further mechanics are worth knowing before a claim rather than during one. Unauthorised calls and data after a loss or theft are covered to £10,000, but only from the moment of discovery plus 24 hours — the clock is short and it starts when you notice, not when you report. And you will be asked for proof of ownership showing make, model or serial number, so the original receipt or order email is the document to keep. Accessories — cases, headphones and the like — are outside the policy entirely, as is cosmetic damage that does not affect how the device works.

What the outside evidence adds up to

Three independent readings exist, and they point in slightly different directions.

The strongest is Defaqto, which has rated the mobile phone policy 5 Stars in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Defaqto's stars measure the features and limits in a wording rather than customer service, and three consecutive years is a real result in a market where many sellers have no rating at all. The company's own awards page shows nothing for 2026, and Defaqto reissues annually, so the most recent published rating is a year old as this page is written. Behind Defaqto sit older trophies: five straight What Mobile insurance provider wins from 2016 to 2020, and a runner-up place in 2021.

The second is the company's own claims figure. Protect Your Bubble publishes an acceptance rate of 96.7% for July to December 2025. A self-published number is not an audited one, but a firm that prints a claims statistic with a period attached has given the reader something to hold it to, which is more than most of this market does.

The third is the Financial Ombudsman Service, whose half-yearly business data published on 22 July 2026 records 402 new cases against Assurant General Insurance Limited between 1 July 2025 and 31 March 2026, all of them general insurance. The FOS received 146,603 new complaints about all financial businesses in that nine-month window, of which 34,318 concerned general insurance and pure protection. What that release does not give is an uphold rate for an individual firm, so 402 is a measure of volume and not of who was right — and it covers every policy Assurant writes in the UK, not the gadget book alone. Smart Money People, which does publish per-product scores, has 3.93 out of 5 on the gadget product from 20 reviews, last reviewed 2 September 2026; twenty reviews is too small a sample to lean on, and it is quoted here as the only per-product consumer score that carries a date.

Where the published paperwork stops short

The documents are better than average and still leave three gaps.

The gadget terms and conditions offered for download are dated April 2022. The Insurance Product Information Document is more current, but the two are not a matched set, and the terms carry no excess figures at all — they say the excess "will vary depending on the type of device, the make, model, specifications, and what type of claim you are making" and send the reader to a separate page. Those figures do exist and are published in full, which is to the firm's credit; they simply are not in the contract document where a careful buyer would look for them.

No maximum device value is stated anywhere on the public pages. For most phones that will not matter. For a £2,000-plus laptop or a high-specification MacBook it is the first question to ask before paying, and the answer is not written down.

The third gap is corporate rather than consumer. Assurant's UK business-statements page lists headings for Solvency and Financial Condition Reports and for Section 172 statements, and no documents sit beneath either — the linked 2024 group report returns a 404. Gender pay gap reports to 2025 and a 2025 modern slavery statement are all present and current, so this reads as a broken page rather than a policy of silence. It still means the published solvency position of the insurer standing behind the policy cannot be read from the insurer's own site, and that would need confirming with the firm.

One last thing the shop window does not spell out. The 20% discount that produces the £5.99 headline applies only within 30 days of buying the phone and only on policies of two items or fewer, so the advertised price and the multi-gadget price cannot be combined.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 13 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.