That's an insane amount - how old is the dryer?

I've replaced two heating elements in my ~9 year old Samsung dryer, I think the heating elements were less than 50 USD. I did the labor myself so I don't know how much that would have been - you do have to take the dryer apart, but it doesn't take very long if you have experience, 15-20 minutes or less.

I would not recommend Samsung - I've had to take that dryer apart more than 10 times to replace/fix things, I can't imagine how much it would have cost me if I couldn't do it myself. The only plus there is now I can literally break it down and put it back together very quickly when I need to fix it.

Luckily the Samsung washer has been fine.

The heating elements were buried deep in the machine and would have involved many hours of labour to take it apart; it took long enough to strip it down to the point where I realised how complex it was going to be to get any further. Machine was bought in late 2021, but was unfortunately out of guarantee by a couple of months when it broke. I’m happy to tear stuff down (spent yesterday unsticking the fan on a vacuum cleaner) but that was too much for me.

So what did you end up doing to fix it? My old whirlpool dryer is bulletproof and easy to repair.

Paid to get the entire bottom half of the inside of the machine replaced. It was that, or spending weeks trying to debug the problem with non-existant parts, or buy a new one.