Pricing automated products

[Doug R.]

How do others price their automated products? I'm trying to price mead, and a significant portion of it it automated. However, it's a very long process and the output is small. I would think that scarcity should factor in somehow. I have no real life business experience, so I don't know how things like this work in the real world.

[SekoETC]

I think I counted starting an automated project as one day of work.

One option would be to take another healing food of about the same complexity that doesn't require any automation, and scale it to that. I'm taking grape juice for comparison. Grapes are gathered at 75 grams a day manual or 135 grams a day with a bone knife. Regular knife can be ignored because most people don't have it, so if someone does, they're allowed to make profit. One day makes 200 grams of grape juice out of 300 grapes. That means either 5 or 3.22 days to make the batch. So you can make 62 or 40 grams a day. 27 grams to heal one percent of damage, so you can heal either 2.30 or 1.48 damage per day of work. With mead, 14 grams heals one percent of damage, so if you multiply that with those numbers, you get 30.15 or 20.74. And there are probably healing foods more efficient than grape juice. But it seems to prove that you should ask 30 grams a day or 20 grams a day at most if you're a cheapskate. If you use 40 or 50, people should be very happy.

[Doug R.]

Interesting. I arrived at the same number as you by just halving the automated time and adding it to the manual time. And if you're bargaining, you always start at your "cheapest" position

[EchoMan]

I've been pricing the fermenting part (3 days) of spirits equal to 1 day of work. I have a harder time with pricing animal products, because it's difficult to know the scarcity of things. Some islands don't have wool, some lack hide and fur, some feathers etc.

[Chris]

That's funny. I also count automation as one day per batch. If the automation time is really long (e.g., up to 80 days on a drying rack), then I use some other system such as finding a comparable product that isn't automated.

[FrankieLeonie]

I usually cut the time in half for wine and mead. both are around 15-20g a day. But both my characters that make it are in remote places where this is rare and light healing food is a must.

[Snickie]

How do people usually price brandy compared with weaker healing foods such as mead?

Brandy is 4 days in a still for 150g, out of 400g grape juice, which doesn't take too long even for my awkward cooks to make. Mead requires honey, clarified if I'm not mistaken, meaning you have to first get the honey (beehive or otherwise; also consider how you get the flowers: herb garden? Flowerpot or windowbox? Natural gathering?), and then work to clarify, and then it sits in a cask for 20 days for some measley amount. Takes more time and potentially more work than brandy, although, unlike brandy, a town anywhere with the right equipment can produce mead. You don't need a constant supply of grapes, which can't be grown, for mead.

So taking everything above into consideration....

[FrankieLeonie]

Brandy seems a bit out of wack compared to lets say wine. I guess you could argue that making a pot still is a much harder feat then a cask, so maybe you need to add that factor into it.

Wine 20 days
Cask 3 days
1500g wood 3 days
400g steel 8 days (max)

Total 36 days for your first batch

Brandy 3 days
Pot Still 5 days
Iron Tubing 2 days
1000g Iron 20 days
Steel Kettle 2 days
800g steel 16 days

Total 48 days for your first batch

[Chris]

I have never charged for the machines because the seller still owns them after the sale. If the product is rare, one can always adjust the price upward for that.