Lauren Goode takes you on a detailed walk through your options. Two stand out. The first is to have an iCracked tech come to you:

I went to iCracked’s website last Tuesday and requested a tech. Within seconds I had a text message from a repair tech. We chatted on the phone, during which time he gave me an estimate. We scheduled an appointment.

On Thursday he showed up at my door with his toolkit. The repairs should take under an hour and average around $99, according to the company. It took my iTech around 25 minutes to fix the iPhone 5S, which was great. But it cost $213, including components, labor and tax.

Afterwards, I tested it to make sure it was working properly. So far, it’s been working as it should.

Another option is to fix the screen yourself using an iFixit repair kit.

I purchased an iPhone 5 repair kit for around $165, including tax and shipping, from iFixit’s website. Within a couple days my kit arrived in the mail. It included a new iPhone 5 screen, a suction cup, two tiny screwdrivers, a plastic pry tool and a magnetized project board with a dry-erase marker – a good idea, since the screws you’re working with are speck-sized.

Then I went to iFixit’s iPhone 5 online repair guide. This is published by the techs at iFixit, but also offers helpful comments and suggestions from other users. The company just put out its iPhone 5S repair guide today, but there’s a reason why I opted to test the DIY kit on a broken iPhone 5 and not my iPhone 5S: I was concerned I might damage the cable that runs under the TouchID fingerprint sensor and disable it.

Disassembling the phone was the easy part (see video below). I was a little bit surprised when I got to the end of those steps, popped the new display in the phone and the iFixit guide told me to just reverse what I had done. Um, okay.

Aside from handling really, really tiny screws, the dicey part was reconnecting the earpiece speaker and camera sensor. I was positive those weren’t going to work once I reassembled the thing. Miraculously, they worked.

It took me an hour and ten minutes to replace the screen myself.

Personally, I would go the iFixIt route. I love taking things apart and putting them back together. Sometimes, the things even work again after I am done with them. Heh.

Good article, Lauren. I learned a lot.