How we calculate WoW crafting profit

The formula

Every profit figure on this site is an estimate, the same subtraction done fresh on each page load against the most recent Auction House snapshot:

estimated profit = crafted item's lowest listed price × items per craft − reagent cost − 5% Auction House cut

Reagent cost is the sum of each slot's quantity times that reagent's lowest current commodity listing. Where a recipe slot accepts several interchangeable reagents of the same quality rank, we take the cheapest one that has a price. For a current-expansion recipe the reagents are rank 1 and the crafted item is the rank 1 item: the base comparison, because rank 1 reagents cannot be shown to produce anything higher. The crafted item's figure is its lowest current listing, not a vendor price, not a sale price and not a historical average.

Items per craft comes from the game's own spell data, which says how many items one craft creates; the listed value of a craft is that many times the lowest listing. Where the number varies from craft to craft, we count one.

The 5% is Blizzard's consignment cut on a successful sale. A seller never sees it, so a profit figure that ignores it is overstated by 5% of the sale price - 1,250 gold on a 25,000 gold craft. Most crafting calculators quietly skip it. We subtract it, and show the pre-cut figure separately so the two are never confused.

Listings are not sales

Every price here is an asking price: the lowest listing at the latest snapshot. We do not see sales. An auction that disappears between snapshots may have sold, been cancelled or expired, so we never count one as a sale, and several listings do not prove several sellers or any buyer. Demand is therefore unknown, and every profit figure on this site is an estimate at listed prices, never a realized result.

Why some recipes show no number

A price we do not have is not a price of zero. If any single reagent has no current listing, the total cost is unknown, and a profit derived from an unknown cost would be arithmetic dressed up as a fact. So the figure is left blank and the page says which input is missing.

This is why a recipe you know is profitable may show nothing here. The usual cause is the crafted item itself: our price feed reads the region-wide commodity Auction House, where herbs, ore, cloth and reagents trade, and most crafted gear is not a commodity - it sells per realm, in ones and twos. A recipe whose output is a piece of gear therefore has a fully-priced reagent list and no priced output, and we would rather show that gap than paper over it.

Two guards before a craft is ranked

A number being computable does not make it real. Two filters stand between a computed profit and any "best crafts" ranking.

Market depth. The cheapest listing is an ask, never a sale. With one listing and no competition it is simply whatever someone typed into the price box. So a craft is only ranked when its finished item has at least 3 live auctions and 10 units on the region-wide Auction House behind it. Unknown depth does not pass: an item with no depth recorded is treated as untraded rather than assumed liquid.

The outlier ratio. When the crafted item's listed value exceeds reagent cost by more than 50x, the arithmetic is almost always tracking one absurd listing rather than a market. Both guards came out of a real audit: a table of "best crafts" that had filled up with nineteen-year-old Burning Crusade meta gems priced at 4,999 gold by a single seller, against four units in stock region-wide.

A recipe that fails either guard still gets its page and still shows its arithmetic. It is simply labelled as having no real market, and it never appears in a ranking.

What we do not model

Quality tiers and Concentration. Every figure assumes a base-quality craft with no Concentration spent. For current-expansion recipes, where Concentration raises output quality without extra reagents, read our profit as the base-quality floor and compare recipes on gold per point of Concentration rather than on the headline number.

Specializations, procs and multicraft. Resourcefulness and Multicraft change real reagent cost and real output per craft, and both depend on a character's own specialization tree. We price the recipe, not your character.

Your time, and the crafting orders market. Gold per craft is not gold per hour, and a public crafting order commission is a different business from selling the item.

Undercutting. The lowest listing is the price today, before you list. On a thin item, your own listing may be the thing that moves it.

Where the numbers come from

Recipes, reagents and quantities are read from the current World of Warcraft client build - the same data the game ships - so a recipe appears here when it appears in the game, not when someone gets around to typing it in. Prices come from Blizzard's own Auction House API, which publishes a fresh region-wide commodity snapshot roughly hourly. Each recipe page timestamps the snapshot it used, so you can see how old the number you are reading is.

Nothing on a recipe page is a stored figure. Costs and profits are recomputed from the latest snapshot at the moment the page is built, which is why an estimate can be positive in the morning and negative in the evening.

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