ELI5: I pay $60 a year for insurance on my drone. Lost drone within first year. Get $1K back, no questions asked. How the heck does the insurance company make money?

Insurance is about distributing risk, you have a small chance of losing your drone so the prices can be fairly small but still cover you for an expensive thing because the insurance company isn't looking at you alone. They're looking at 1,000 people all wanting insurance for a drone with a 2% chance of losing/breaking it, as far as they are concerned each year they make 1,000×$60 but only pay out 20×$1,000 that's $40,000 profit.

Insurance companies are also smarter than they look, you're giving them $60 and they're investing a large portion of it to make even more profit rather than keeping it in cash.

And even smarter is insurance companies that cover small things often have their own insurance to cover the risk that a large number of people have drone problems(imagine a new software update that causes them to randomly disconnect and fly into things or out of range). The larger insurance company has hundreds or thousands of smaller insurance companies as clients each buying lots of insurance in case there's a much larger number of claims than anticipated. This means that even if everyone who owned a drone claims on the insurance the company you're paying $60 to still makes a profit despite paying out 17 times more than their customers are paying. The larger insurance company is typically safe because the insurance they sell is for a wide range of insurance companies covering an even larger range of products, no single product causing problems will majorly hurt the larger insurance companies profits.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread