Skill Discussions

Freighters can only do one thing: Move stuff.

You can use that to make money by either trading (Buy item cheap at location A, move to B, sell high) in bulk or by doing courier contracts. The former can also be done with smaller ships (industrials, orca) so I only recommend getting a freighter if you really need it to move a lot of stuff often. For the second option I can recommend the ingame Haulers Channel as a source of contracts.

Keep in mind when you buy your freighter you also need isk to fill it (goods you're trading or collateral for contracts). Usually 1 billion or sometimes more is preferred in the case of courier contracts.

Freighters move stuff for other people. You can do that independently, or as a member of a Freighter corporation such as Push or Red Frog.

But how are you going to pay for your Freighter? Last time I checked, they were around 1350M ISK a piece, in Jita. They're freakin' expensive. On top of that, if you haul stuff for other people, the Courier Contracts will involve collaterals, ISK that is taken from your wallet and put on a separate account temporarily. You get it back if you complete the contract as specified, but if you screw up, or if you cheat the contract issuer, he gets the money. Collaterals are often very large. Routinely 1 billion ISK (1000 million) for cargoes worth 500 to 950 million ISK. And, my hunch is that most who issue Freighter Courier Contracts always sets the collateral at 1 billion, so that there are very few contracts that you can actually accept if you have only, say, 600 or 700 million ISK.

Assuming you can muster the almost 2.5 billion ISK needed (buy EVE Time Codes, e.g. from Shattered Crystal, and sell for ISK, maybe?), the fees aren't horribly low, but don't strike me as very attractive either.

Push, which I've made use of, charges a per-cntract free of half a million, plus a further half million per jump. Thus to move something 14 jumps costs as if it were 15 jumps (J+1) and at 500k/jump it's 7.5 million ISK.

Red Frog charges a but more, but not much. I don't remember their pricing structure, but you can find it easily with Google. As far as I know, a Push pilot gets the entire fee (all 7.5 million), and the same is probably the case for Red Frog.

7.5 million for a mere 14-jump trip may sound very, very nice, but the fact is, Freighters are unbelieavably slow. Painfully slow. That's why I pay others to haul my crap around. I can't be arsed to move it on manual (warp to gate, jump, warp to gate, jump), because Freighters warp at 0.7 AU/s so it takes many, many minutes to cross a solar system, and long trips (such as 8-20 jumps) take forever. I do sometimes move stuff on autopilot while AFK (I have a Freighter of my own - just rarely use it) but that takes even longer, easily a couple of hours.

So I imagine that Freighter pilots do something else while flying on manual. Watch Netflix on their tablets, or something. Maybe they chat with friends in EVE. Personally I'd find Netflix distracting. I wouldn't be able to fully engage with the show, movie or docu that I was watching, and that would bother me no end, but if it works for you, fine.

basically that. I have a freighter alt that i used to fly around and pick up large bulks of minerals ice blocks and ore i buy cheap from other people.


It takes about 3 monthes to train from a brand new account to full functioning freighter. After that either train the account to do something more important(Working on refining skills now) Or start a second pilot on the same account and train it to sell/ do missions.

Otherwise a just freighter account that does nothing but haul isnt worth the plex each month to keep it going.

Thank you for your replies...got an idea of what to do next! :)