Profitable publicly open upwell structure

My dream has been publicly open Upwell structure. I have been unable to find financing model that brings at least fuel price back from keeping structure open. Upwell structure would need enormous amount of clients every day so it would bring fuel price back.

This is discussion thread how to create profitable publicly open Upwell structure. Perhaps someone has already done this. There are lots of Upwell structures open but I’m unsure if any of them are producing profit for their owners.

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A fortizar with a market module in a good location can make you a lot of money.

… but only if you can field ~1000 people at every timer.

Else there is no valid business model outside of being a corp/alliance dictator forcing people to use your structures in a high index system.

it doesn’t cost any fuel to have one with no services, the services is what determines how much fuel you need and how many customers @ a certain tax you need. Open citadels are a dime a dozen now so bad they plague certain areas of space, but most also don’t have services.

Yeah. They are too safe, and there are too many of them to support anything close to profit. The one exception being something with a Market Module, but you will have to be able to defend that from your competitors who won’t want you muscling in on their turf.

Maybe once (if?) compression becomes taxable, there will be some space for local profitable compression/refining structures, but even then I would only expect you to be able to cover the fuel costs with some small profit in a busy system (and not ever the sunk cost of the structure except perhaps on very long time-scales). Taxes from moon mining require force to extract from your customers, and if they ever come to highsec even that won’t be possible, and Engineering Complexes suffer from the index problem meaning serious builders prefer to spread out and not use public structures. Plus the tax structures of the Engineering Complexes are, as far as I know, still broken as they are based on those industry indexes. Last time I used one I was paying like 150 ISK (yes, just 150) to install a job in a quiet system meaning there is no hope of that owner ever making a profit.

I don’t think public Upwell structures will ever be profitable without a serious nerf to NPC stations. That said, if you have the resources, and more imagination than I, you might find the right place and services to turn a profit, especially if you build a rapport with your customers and maybe a recognized brand. Just remember though that a public profile might bring some attention (and shortly after, wardecs) your way so factor in defending your stuff as part of your business plan.

Owning a Raitaru saves ISK for manufacturers that make good use of them. Public use of them, at least in hisec, is icing on the cake.

The order of choosing for casual manufacturers should be
A suitable Rig - 2% bonus.
An EC - 1% bonus.
Station Tax - at most 0.5% bonus, more likely <0.2%.
It should be, but I suspect most don’t do the math!

soon next year the 1 week timer goes away for 3 days on citadels, the index taxes apply to both citadel and stations as I do most of my stuff in npc stations and I have to find empty places due to the fact last time I was finishing up BPOS the owners quit logging in and the stations went without fuel.

When the proposed plans to vulnerability go out unchanged, structure ownership will be tied to an almost 24/7 defense capability (because you must win the armor timer the day after random initial attack, or your structure is dead blocking everything for a week). As most of the structure owners in highsec live only by obscurity and time zone tanking, this will hit them hard.

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Good, it will cut down on the structure spam.

We can only hope so.

Those changes concern structures that are not fueled. If services are not working then the structure is not making isk. So the destruction of defunct structures will have no imapct on the isk making capabilities of the active ones. There are so many 0 tax or near 0 tax structures that it is hard to see any of them making isk anymore.

Some people just like the idea of running their own station, and will do so even if it means a loss of ISK.

DS9 and Babylon 5 roleplay has never been more accessible.

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I presume that the fuel is used to generate power. So if nobody uses your structure it shouldnt consume any fuel. Not sure if this is how it works already, but it seems like thats how it should work. So even if you will never make your investment back, at least it wont burn a hole in your pocket or require refueling 24/7 if it isnt being used by anyone.

Nope, I’m talking about fueled and operational structures.

Not sure what you mean by that. Last I checked, the only change ccp is making is that unfueled structures can be attacked at anytime and lack the middle armor timer. Used/fueled structures will be the same as always. So if a fueled structure was too inconvenient to kill now, it will still be the same after the change.

Yep. this. for sure. In the early days I setup a freeport with just enough tax to pay for the fuel. Seemed a no brainer - people would use it because I assumed all the risk associated with owning and defending it, etc. . . Didnt matter. People would throw up their own and undercut me. Ultimately everybody in system was at 0 or near 0 tax. You might say “take them out with a war” - but that is just tedious. The structures drop nothing of value and are a pain to kill requiring 3 timers. Worse, because of timezone tanking it was impossible for me to take some of them them out. Moreover, the structures are cancer - kill one and two pop up. Its just not worth the effort - unless maybe you are in a big alliance with multiple time zone coverage seeking to control the busiest areas (like ph).

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Not correct. The Vegas announcement was clear on that … the current timers are trashed and replaced by a PoCo like system. Every single structure will be vulnerable 24/7. Once an attacker kills the shield whenever you are sure at sleep the armor timer is ~24h after at the time the defender sets. If you lose this fight your services go offline, with no option to cancel jobs … if you win the attacker comes back next day to repeat.

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