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Ships & Modules

 
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Building VS Buying
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StarterrorPrime
Black Rose Fleet Strategics
#1 - 2017-06-07 05:13:23 UTC
As someone recently returning to the game, and since I never really got into Industry as much as I do now, I've been doing some cost analysis using Jita sell prices on minerals compared to some eve central prices, and there is often some discrepancies between the cost of building the ship versus buying it.

Is it more economic to build or buy?
Soel Reit
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#2 - 2017-06-07 05:46:20 UTC  |  Edited by: Soel Reit
as all in eve... it depends!

do you wanna take in consideration time that you have to use to group up minerals, or to mine them or just to research some bpo/build the ship itself or its components...? then maybe it's cheaper buying it.

you don't care about that part? then do you have miners selling directly to you minerals and other materials needed like for example moon materials etc? or do you buy all of it in the main trade hubs: then someone is already making a profit over the normal cost.

sometimes you can find ships on the market at less than the price you would spend buying minerals for it on the same market.
etc etc

generally speaking is cheaper buying it timewise/iskwise imo.
to build them and have a better efficiency you should have a nice infrastructure behind you which gives/sells you all the materials.
Zhilia Mann
Tide Way Out Productions
#3 - 2017-06-07 07:02:58 UTC
T1? Almost always buy. The time and money you sink into a blueprint is substantial and unless you're planning to build an awful lot of ships, just buy the damn thing.

T2? Ok, this is interesting. If you have the skills, which is not an insubstantial barrier, and you happen to have the component prints, which is also a non-zero barrier, building from a print on contracts might save you some money. But it can be a headache. If you want to go all the way, you'll still need either a BPC to build from or a BPO to make copies to invent from. Depending on the ship, savings can exist. You're still looking at some upfront capital and unless you're scaling it's not likely worthwhile but it's an interesting diversion if you're into it.

T3? See T2, basically.
Do Little
Bluenose Trading
#4 - 2017-06-07 08:30:37 UTC
Most of the time you can make money on T2 and T3 if you build the components in a bonused facility. Right now there is a speculative bubble in moon materials in anticipation of the refineries so you need to be VERY careful when building T2 products.
Chainsaw Plankton
FaDoyToy
#5 - 2017-06-07 16:04:06 UTC
imo it mostly depends on volume. If you just need one then the difference doesn't even matter. If you need 100s of ships then building is probably going to end up better in the long run. For subcaps a bpo costs about 10 times what it costs to build one ship, and then researching the bpo takes a while and costs some isk. for a pirate BS mineral costs were around 130m last I looked, there was usually some savings buying a bpc then building but that involves waiting a few hours for it to build and paying build taxes. Ex right now a mach bpc is 190m, the build cost is 132m (buy all on minerals), the build tax is 10m (can be greatly reduced by moving away from jita but a rather small portion of total costs) totaling 332m, and in Jita the buy it now price 347m.
if you use buy orders to get your minerals and wait out for bpc sales as people constantly undercut sure you can save maybe 20-30mil.

another consideration is how far do you have to move the ship, might be cheap to buy in jita but expensive to transport. if you are trying to move a few subcaps to null it might be easier to buy bpcs and have those moved as moving ships is expensive. then buy the minerals from your corp/alliance miners and build the ships.

@ChainsawPlankto on twitter
Skorpynekomimi
#6 - 2017-06-07 18:40:08 UTC
Are you making things for personal consumption, or for sale?

Ships are hard to sell at a profit. They sell slowly, the blueprints are expensive, they use lots of minerals, and they take a long time to produce.
There's also a LOT of backlog from people who've accumulated stockpiles.
If you want to make money, buy minerals on buy orders or from where they're cheap, and produce stuff that sells in quantity.

You can PROBABLY build a ship cheaper than market value if you can get hold of a BPC with a decent ME off contracts. But likely not. If you want to build your own ships, nothing is stopping you.

Personally, I like building ships. I like creating things. I like looking at things and thinking 'I built that' as I fly it. But then, I' insane, and use EVE as an escape from a life I have little control over, and a job that never really changes one day to the next.

Economic PVP
StarterrorPrime
Black Rose Fleet Strategics
#7 - 2017-06-07 19:05:01 UTC
Skorpynekomimi wrote:
Are you making things for personal consumption, or for sale?

Ships are hard to sell at a profit. They sell slowly, the blueprints are expensive, they use lots of minerals, and they take a long time to produce.
There's also a LOT of backlog from people who've accumulated stockpiles.
If you want to make money, buy minerals on buy orders or from where they're cheap, and produce stuff that sells in quantity.

You can PROBABLY build a ship cheaper than market value if you can get hold of a BPC with a decent ME off contracts. But likely not. If you want to build your own ships, nothing is stopping you.

Personally, I like building ships. I like creating things. I like looking at things and thinking 'I built that' as I fly it. But then, I' insane, and use EVE as an escape from a life I have little control over, and a job that never really changes one day to the next.


A little bit of both, as it seems mass producing ships for sale is the better route in terms of selling and making some on the other side cause as an old pirate, I go through ships like butter doing crazy things
Bjorn Tyrson
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#8 - 2017-06-08 10:27:12 UTC
Building ships is a loss leader. Especially for t1 hulls you will probably not be making much if any isk. In fact on most of them you will loose money, especially in HS.

In null sec the margins get a tiny bit better or at least you won't be bleeding money as badly. The money is in the modules though. Which is why you still build the ship.

If people are having to ship in the hull from Jita, then they will probably just ship all the fittings with it.
Manufacturing on site though, sure you might be loosing say 5m on a hull. But if your selling the guns, the tank, the damage mods, the drones etc etc. Even at 2 mil each. That's your profit right there.
And people look at the hull price first before they decide to ship in or buy local. So keeping your hulls competitive or better than Jita pricing gets the rest of your mods sold.

Tldr. Making ships, especially t1 won't make you much if any money. But they can help you sell everything else that goes with the hull and those are your profits.
StarterrorPrime
Black Rose Fleet Strategics
#9 - 2017-06-08 15:16:17 UTC  |  Edited by: StarterrorPrime
I'd also take into account the cost of Blueprints and efficient copies because with a maxed out mat efficency 10% to 20%, since i peeked at the blueprint market last night and acquired a set of cheap cruiser blueprint copies with mat 20 so that effectively cuts the cost of building the ship quite a bit, even with some jita's mineral prices. Some ships seem cheaper to produce material wise given the proper blueprint, and somewhat turn a profit because i managed to make a line of rifters for about 300k a unit and sold them for about 345k, making a sizeable margin. On a side note, some places minerals costs can effect this greatly in my opinion