Repair or replace

My voltmeter started flashing low battery last night so I opened it up and used a spare 9v battery to replace the flat one. It got me thinking again, should you bother replacing a three quid battery or just buy another three quid multimeter? When I snapped one of the leads it was cheaper to buy another multimeter than buy the leads on their own, but surely we should be looking at repair and maintain instead of chuck and replace?