Big Ambitions Startup Cost Calculator
Pick a business and a building code: the minimum shopping list to open it, the cost, who you must hire, and whether the shelving fills the building.
Community sourcesCurrent for 1.0 Build 3675Data from Early Access 0.9
GamePrimer EditorialUpdated Verified
Choose a business and the code on the unit you are looking at. The calculator lists the fixtures the business cannot open without, the cheapest shelf for each product you tick, the total, who you have to hire, and how far that shelving is from the building’s customer limit.
Requirements and shelving from the community wiki's business pages, prices from its store pages — both for Early Access 0.9. Every price is the cheapest option; the total only goes up from here.
What the total is, and is not
It covers the twelve retail businesses whose every required fixture has a recorded price — offices, gyms, warehouses, factories and the produce store are described on the best starting business page instead, because the wiki lists their equipment only by category. It is the floor. Every line is the cheapest option the community’s store lists record: a cash register rather than a checkout counter, a product panel rather than a rounded shelf. Choose anything nicer and the number goes up; it never goes down. It does not include the lease deposit, stock, a cleaning station, decoration, or the security guard the calculator flags for high-value goods — none of those has a fixed price the wiki records.
Prices are the community wiki’s recorded list prices from Early Access 0.9, the same figures the item finder shows, and that page tells you which store to drive to for each line.
Why there is no profit figure
Because there is nothing honest to build one from. The wiki’s product pages carry a placeholder where the retail price should be; nobody has published customer traffic per neighbourhood or a demand curve; and commercial rents are not recorded anywhere public. A calculator that printed a daily profit would be inventing three of its four inputs. What can be answered is the question before that one: what does it cost to get the door open, and does the building you found justify the shelving you would put in it.
Reading the capacity line
Every shelf serves a fixed number of customers at once and every building code caps how many can be inside — 15 in an A1, 75 in an M1. The last line compares the two. If the building allows more than your shelves serve, the next thing to buy is a second shelf of the product you sell most; if the shelves outrun the building, some of that money is idle until you move to a bigger code.
One thing the wiki adds that the number cannot: capacity is not cumulative across products. Each product needs enough fixtures of its own to reach the customers it is going to serve. Twenty customers of shelving for gifts does nothing for the umbrella queue.
Related
- Best starting business — the same figures for every business, ranked
- Item finder — which store sells each line, and in which neighbourhood
- Blueprints — layouts other players have already furnished for each building code
