Crafting Cost Calculator

Crafting cost analysis helps you decide whether to craft an item yourself or buy it from the market in RPGs and MMOs. The calculator totals up all material costs and compares them against the market price.

Formulas:

Material Cost = Σ (Material Quantity × Price per Unit)

Cost per Successful Craft = Material Cost ÷ Success Rate

Net Sale = Market Price × (1 − Fee%)

Profit or Loss = Net Sale − Cost per Successful Craft

Return on Cost (%) = (Profit ÷ Cost per Successful Craft) × 100

What each variable means:

• Material Name is the crafting ingredient, for your own reference. It only labels the breakdown.
• Material Quantity is how many units the recipe calls for.
• Price Each is what one unit costs you right now, whether from the market or a vendor.
• Market Price of Finished Item is what the finished item sells for.
• Auction House Fee is the cut the game takes off your sale. Most games sit between 5% and 15%.
• Success Rate is the chance the craft works. Below 100%, failed attempts still eat their materials, so the real cost of one finished item is the material cost divided by the success rate.

A word on “margin”

Two different numbers get called margin and people mix them up constantly. Profit divided by cost is return on cost, and it is the one that answers “was this worth doing with my gold”. Profit divided by revenue is the profit margin an accountant means. The same trade can be 43% by the first measure and 30% by the second. This page reports both, labelled, so nobody has to guess which is which.

Practical example: You want to craft a Steel Sword. It takes 10 Iron Ore at 50 gold each (500g), 5 Leather Strips at 100 gold each (500g), and 2 Enchanting Dust at 200 gold each (400g), so 1,400 gold of materials. The sword sells for 2,000 gold.

At 100% success and no fee: profit is 600 gold, a 42.9% return on cost and a 30.0% margin on the sale.

Now put the game’s real numbers in. A 5% auction house cut takes the sale to 1,900. A 90% success rate means you burn 1,556 gold of materials for every sword that survives the attempt. Profit falls to 344 gold, a 22.1% return. Still worth doing, but roughly half of what the naive figure promised, and that gap is where crafters lose money without noticing.

Tips and common mistakes:

• Gathering materials yourself is not free. Price them at what you could have sold them for, not zero
• Prices swing by time of day and by day of the week. Raid nights move consumables, weekends move gear
• Batch crafting helps when the recipe has a proc or a mastery bonus, otherwise it just multiplies the same margin
• If the finished item sells slowly, the gold is locked up. A 20% return that takes a week can be worse than a 10% one that clears in an hour