Here's a boring prediction I'll stand behind: the policies that perform best over thirty years belong to owners who automated the premium in week one and the ones that lapse belong to owners who paid by hand. The design matters, the carrier matters, and neither matters as much as the premium arriving every single year without a decision.
Willpower is a terrible payment system. A manual premium asks you to re-choose the policy every year, forever, including the years when money is tight, the market is loud, or the mailbox delivers the bill the same week as the property taxes. People aren't weak. The ask is just unreasonable. Systems don't re-choose. Set the autodraft and the policy gets funded in the exact years a hand-payer would've skipped, and those are precisely the years that decide the whole outcome, as the cost-of-waiting math shows from the other direction.
Three settings make the autopilot sturdy. First, timing: put the draft right after a payday, so the money never sits in checking long enough to get spent. Second, mode: ask your carrier what monthly payments cost versus annual, because most charge extra for monthly, and paying annually from a sinking fund you feed monthly captures the discount while keeping the monthly rhythm. Third, PUAs: if your design includes flexible paid-up additions, automate a default amount too. You can always adjust it in a tight year. Flexibility you must remember to use isn't flexibility, it's a skipped payment with better branding.
And keep a backstop behind the automation. Confirm your contract's grace period, and ask whether the automatic premium loan provision is elected, so a missed draft doesn't become a lapsed policy while you're distracted by real life. Autopay covers the ordinary years. The backstop covers the strange ones. Between the two, your policy's funding stops depending on your memory at all, which frees the first-90-days energy for decisions that actually need you.