They're expensive garbage.
It almost sort of makes some sense for a Carpet Python except that there are better alternatives. There are better options but for Carpets they can be used to increase the ambient temperature in a way which is relevant to them. Floor heat is cheaper, safer and more reliable and generally more suitable, but where you want ambient heat you'd be better off with something like a heat panel (cheaper when you take replacements into consideration, more reliable, more versatile, safer because the snake can't break it or wrap around it etc).
For a Beardy it just makes no sense. Bearded Dragons are heliothermic, they actively bask in direct sunlight, they want a hot basking spot (hotter than a Carpet wants - a Carpet is primarily nocturnal and doesn't go sit on a hot basking spot fully exposed in direct sun in at all the same way a Beardy does). Whenever a Beardy is seeking out heat, it's doing so in direct sunlight, not in the dark (unlike a Carpet which is nocturnal and for the most part seeks out ground heat or just relies on ambient temperature). A spotlight is far cheaper than an infrared, it simulates the sun because it puts out visible light which makes it clearly better, and it has no downsides to trade off against the two big positives compared to an infrared.
A good yard stick to use when determining what products are good and which are rubbish aimed at new keepers in order to extract money from their inexperience is to look at what the large scale veteran keepers do - the people who have been doing it on a large scale for a long time know what they're doing, and they don't use infrareds, so neither should you. In over 30 years of keeping reptiles I'm yet to find an application where an infrared makes any sense. Sure, it'll work in some situations, but there are better, cheaper, safer, more reliable alternatives for every single one of them.
