Manufacturing Profit Guide — ME, Job Cost and Real Margins

Every build resolves to one line: profit = product market value − material cost − job cost − sales tax and broker fees. ISK Scout evaluates this against live order books rather than average prices — materials priced at what you would actually pay, the product at what buyers actually offer. That distinction matters, because average-price calculators routinely show profit on builds that lose ISK against the real book.

The engine recomputes every blueprint against every hub every 5 minutes, then filters out builds a real player could not execute: blueprints that never trade on the market, products whose entire margin rests on one or two sell orders, and profit levels that only appear at volumes the market cannot absorb. What remains is a short list — typically a few hundred viable builds out of tens of thousands of blueprints.

Material Efficiency (ME) research reduces a blueprint's input quantities by 1% per level, up to 10% at ME 10. The subtlety is in the rounding: EVE always rounds material requirements up per job, using ceil(base quantity × (1 − 0.01 × ME)). Research applies to the total consumed in one job — which produces a counterintuitive result for small runs.

Practical consequence: compare margins at the run count you will actually build, not at theoretical ME 10 single runs. ISK Scout's calculator lets you set ME per blueprint precisely so the ceil arithmetic matches your real job — for high-volume ammo and drone builds the difference between ME 8 and ME 10 is routinely the entire margin.

Installing a job costs a fee proportional to the estimated value of the input materials, scaled by the system cost index — a percentage that rises with how much industry activity a system hosts. Busy hub-adjacent systems commonly run several percent; quiet backwaters run under one. ISK Scout models this as a configurable job cost rate from 0 to 15%, because the right value depends on where you actually build.

Time Efficiency (TE) does not change the profit of one job — it changes how many jobs you fit in a week. For always-sold-out products, TE and slot count set your revenue ceiling, which makes profit per day the honest metric for comparing builds. A 40M-profit build that cycles daily beats a 100M build that takes four days, and the engine's ranking reflects the cycle, not just the single-job number.

Most calculated margins assume favorable fills: buying materials from sell orders and selling the product to a resting buy order, or patiently flipping both sides with limit orders. A small set of builds clears an unusually strict test — profitable even when you buy every input instantly from sell orders and dump the product instantly into buy orders. No waiting, no undercut wars, margin locked at both ends.

ISK Scout marks these builds with a dedicated badge. They are rarer and usually thinner per unit than headline margins, but they are as close to risk-free industry as EVE offers — the margin survives the worst-case execution on both sides. New industrialists should start here: the badge builds teach the loop without exposure to price movement while orders rest.

The most common manufacturing loss is not a fee miscalculation — it is building for a market that does not exist. A product with two sell orders at inflated prices shows a spectacular margin right up until your production run arrives and becomes the market. The engine drops products whose apparent profit rests on a handful of thin orders, and applies a minimum per-cycle profit floor to weed out margins that vanish under one round of competition.