Automation payback: the actual numbers

What you are actually buying

An un-automated generator does nothing on its own. You press “Trade” on it, one trade runs, it pays, and it goes back to sitting there. Automation makes it restart its own trades forever — including, and this is the part that matters, while the tab is closed. Offline earnings are calculated from automated generators only, capped at eight hours.

So a floor with no automation earns nothing overnight, however enormous it is. That is the real price of skipping it, and it does not show up in any number on the screen.

The payback formula

Automation costs a flat 15× base price — it never gets more expensive, no matter how many units you own. Income, meanwhile, scales with unit count. Put those together and the time for automation to repay itself is:

(Every price below is before the city's market phase, which takes 25% off during the opening bell and adds 40% during the squeeze. The phase moves the cost and the payback time together, so the comparisons between tiers hold whichever phase you are in.)

payback seconds ≈ 3.75 × (baseCost ÷ baseRate) ÷ units owned

The cost-to-rate ratio is a fixed property of each tier, so the only lever you control is the second one. Ten units means a tenth of the payback time. Here is the table at one, ten and twenty-five units:

A Crypto Exchange costs $21M to automate, which feels absurd — until you notice that at twenty-five of them it has repaid that in under eight minutes and then pays you all night.

The rule of the twentieth unit

Unit prices grow 15% each time you buy one, so the cost of yournth unit is base × 1.15ⁿ. Set that equal to the automation price and solve: 1.15ⁿ = 15 gives n ≈ 19.4.

In other words, automating a tier costs about what your twentieth unit of it costs. If you own fewer than twenty, automation is the cheaper purchase and it is also the one that keeps working while you sleep. If you own more than twenty and still have not automated, you are actively paying a premium to keep doing the clicking yourself.

The practical order that falls out of this: buy units until the next one starts to sting, automate, then go back to buying units. Do not automate a tier you own one of, unless you are about to go to bed — in which case, do.

Two ways to waste it

Automating right before a prestige. Resetting the run wipes your generators and their automation. Money spent on automation in the last stretch of a run buys you a few minutes of convenience and then evaporates. If you are within sight of the prestige threshold, put every coin into the highest tier you can afford instead — that pushes lifetime earnings, which is what stars are calculated from.

Automating everything, evenly. Automation on a tier you have four of is a rounding error in your income. The payback table is brutal about this: four Interns repay their automation in about two and a half minutes, four Crypto Exchanges in nearly an hour. Concentrate on the tiers you are actually stacking. Spreading purchases thin is the most common way to stall a run.

One discount worth knowing

The Bargain Hunter character buff takes 8% off generator prices per level, to a maximum of four levels — and it applies to automation costs too, not just units. At full rank that is 32% off every automation purchase for the rest of the game, on top of the unit savings. It is bought with gems rather than stars or coins, so it never competes with region progress or your working capital.

Next: the prestige and regions guide covers when to give all of this up on purpose. If you would rather read why generators work this way at all, the devlog on timed trades explains the model behind the numbers.