Estimation of the cost of offering a warranty on a product, what type of warranty, for what duration, and so forth, is of concern to producers of consumer and commercial goods, ranging from relatively inexpensive items such as alarm clocks to automobiles and jet aircraft. The distributions studied are the more common ones used in reliability and warranty applications, namely, the exponential, Weibull, gamma, log-normal, and mixed exponential. Parameter values for each distribution were chosen so that the different distributions are comparable in the sense that they have the same mean and, where possible, the same variance as well. The Weibull and gamma distributions can take on various shapes and can have an increasing failure rate or decreasing failure rate, depending on the value of the shape parameter. The log-normal distribution is sometimes used as an alternative, particularly in applications where failures are due to material fracture or breakage.