In-depth Guide on the Free Roam Businesses
Oct 10, 2017 14:32:37 GMT
beta1hit and bryanshadow like this
Post by Skirakzalus on Oct 10, 2017 14:32:37 GMT
There's a lot of ways to make money in GTAOnline and R* keeps adding new ways to make money in free roam public lobbies, but how well do they really pay? I'd like to provide an answer to that question in this this thread by breaking down the payouts to the amount you would be getting for each mission. If you want to know how these values come to be you can click on the spoilers for an explaination and further information (/!\CAUTION: MATH/!\). Also I'll be adding any new business to the list as soon as I figured them out.
Before we get into the rating though I have to point out a few things. Most of the free roam stuff is way too risky and frustrating to do in a public lobby full of random players. Anybody messing with you is in a better position by default, because they don't have anything on the line and respawn nearby if you kill them. And you can do so over and over, but if they get in a few hits on the product you're collecting or selling you lose. So you'll likely want to either find a lobby with only a few people, get one with mostly your friends/crew members, or make your own empty one.
Another thing is that I'll be focusing on doing this stuff primarily solo. And in fact a lot of these businesses don't pay better depending on the amount of people helping you. Also in "quit pro quo"-situations it often times amounts to the same outcome if you're helping out someone who helped you. The mechanics are tuned in a way that hinders people from making it really effective.
The last point I have to make is that there are going to be two lists, one for active ways to make money, one for passive ones. This difference is important since you can keep a passive way running while doing a lot of other things like an active method that actually requires your attention and input, something more fun in GTAOnline, playing anything on another platform, or writing longwinded articles like this one.
Passive ways to make money:
Active ways to make money:
Before we get into the rating though I have to point out a few things. Most of the free roam stuff is way too risky and frustrating to do in a public lobby full of random players. Anybody messing with you is in a better position by default, because they don't have anything on the line and respawn nearby if you kill them. And you can do so over and over, but if they get in a few hits on the product you're collecting or selling you lose. So you'll likely want to either find a lobby with only a few people, get one with mostly your friends/crew members, or make your own empty one.
Another thing is that I'll be focusing on doing this stuff primarily solo. And in fact a lot of these businesses don't pay better depending on the amount of people helping you. Also in "quit pro quo"-situations it often times amounts to the same outcome if you're helping out someone who helped you. The mechanics are tuned in a way that hinders people from making it really effective.
The last point I have to make is that there are going to be two lists, one for active ways to make money, one for passive ones. This difference is important since you can keep a passive way running while doing a lot of other things like an active method that actually requires your attention and input, something more fun in GTAOnline, playing anything on another platform, or writing longwinded articles like this one.
Passive ways to make money:
| Rank | Business | Payout for processing a full supply bar (costs 75k) | Estimated lenght of selling missions | Teamwork |
| 1 | Bunkers | 140k nearby/210k further away | 5 to 20 minutes | Sometimes necessary |
{Spoiler}
Apart from the optional costs up to of 75k for a resupply the bunker has an upkeep cost of about 9.4k every ingame day. The resupply missions vary in time by quite a margin, also depending on which bunker you own. The objectives aren't as boring as bikers for example and when you get your supplies in a vehicle that in itself counts as supplies, too, filling up more than just 1/5 of the supply bar. If you are doing the supply missions in a team you'll get multiple supplies in one mission.
The values of 140k/210k (which is 20% of the capacity of the bunker) are of course for upgraded bunkers (the security upgrade isn't necessary for this) and selling for less than ~175k base value will only spawn one vehicle. This means that you can conviniently purchase a full resupply, go afk or do something else and come back as soon as everything's processed. It's still good value for not much effort. If you however go above the 175k you'll likely need help to sell the product in time, for a (near) full sale you should get a team of four.
Apart from the optional costs up to of 75k for a resupply the bunker has an upkeep cost of about 9.4k every ingame day. The resupply missions vary in time by quite a margin, also depending on which bunker you own. The objectives aren't as boring as bikers for example and when you get your supplies in a vehicle that in itself counts as supplies, too, filling up more than just 1/5 of the supply bar. If you are doing the supply missions in a team you'll get multiple supplies in one mission.
The values of 140k/210k (which is 20% of the capacity of the bunker) are of course for upgraded bunkers (the security upgrade isn't necessary for this) and selling for less than ~175k base value will only spawn one vehicle. This means that you can conviniently purchase a full resupply, go afk or do something else and come back as soon as everything's processed. It's still good value for not much effort. If you however go above the 175k you'll likely need help to sell the product in time, for a (near) full sale you should get a team of four.
| Rank | Business | Payout for processing a full supply bar (costs 75k) | Estimated lenght of selling missions | Teamwork |
| 2 | Bikers | 112k nearby/168k further away | 20 to 30 minutes | Sometimes necessary |
{Spoiler}
The values above are for the cocaine factory (fully upgraded), which is the most profitable of the five types bikers has to offer. The upkeep cost is somewhere between 8k and 9k every 48 minutes. As with bunkers you'll get more supplies per mission if you have a team and selling alone isn't adviced either.
Most of the missions (selling and supplying) are a slug. They take a lot of time with mostly boring scenarios like driving some really slow vehicle across half the map while serving as a target for anybody else in the lobby.
Another bad thing about bikers is that the factories don't have a high capacity and the amount of selling vehicles is based on how full your product bar was. And what you get out of one supply bar will fill the factoriy by 40% meaning you'll get to deliver two vehicles which takes much more time.
Also I should mention that all other biker factories are worse. They pay less money for the same input while having either the same or worse capacity, but at least they have less upkeep cost.
The values above are for the cocaine factory (fully upgraded), which is the most profitable of the five types bikers has to offer. The upkeep cost is somewhere between 8k and 9k every 48 minutes. As with bunkers you'll get more supplies per mission if you have a team and selling alone isn't adviced either.
Most of the missions (selling and supplying) are a slug. They take a lot of time with mostly boring scenarios like driving some really slow vehicle across half the map while serving as a target for anybody else in the lobby.
Another bad thing about bikers is that the factories don't have a high capacity and the amount of selling vehicles is based on how full your product bar was. And what you get out of one supply bar will fill the factoriy by 40% meaning you'll get to deliver two vehicles which takes much more time.
Also I should mention that all other biker factories are worse. They pay less money for the same input while having either the same or worse capacity, but at least they have less upkeep cost.
Active ways to make money:
| Rank | Business | Payout per mission | Lenght of missions | Teamwork |
| 1 | CEO Crates | 42k | Mostly rather short | Not needed in empty lobbies |
{Spoiler}
Many may scratch their heads now on why this is on top and where the 42k come from, so let's break it down: You will want to fill up a large warehouse and sell for the maximum price. This means 111 crates for 2.22 Millions. This means at the end each crate will be worth 20k. For small warehouses the worth goes down to 15k, for medium sized ones it's ~17k.
So if we take that 20k/crate and look at the missions we'll see that a one crate mission gives 20k but costs 2k, leaving us with a net profit of 18k. For 2 crates it's 32k (2x20k-8k) and 3 crate missions take the cake with 42k (3x20k-18k). You'll need to do 37 supply missions before one selling mission, so I'm not considering that one in this equasion. Otherwise it will go down to 40.4k per mission.
Another factor is the lenght of each mission. Crates are mostly confined to Los Santos, only on rare occasion you are leaving the city. Even when soloing the 3 crate missions you often get a vehicle anyways, and if not going back and forth in the city (maybe with a Buzzard, which I'd highly suggest you buy for this) the missions usually aren't that long.
The biggest problem may be that this stuff can get boring after a while and you simply shouldn't sell your product with too many randoms around. Also there's a cooldown between each supply mission which can be bypassed by doing either a headhunter mission (great value) or filling up two warehouses simultaneously.
Many may scratch their heads now on why this is on top and where the 42k come from, so let's break it down: You will want to fill up a large warehouse and sell for the maximum price. This means 111 crates for 2.22 Millions. This means at the end each crate will be worth 20k. For small warehouses the worth goes down to 15k, for medium sized ones it's ~17k.
So if we take that 20k/crate and look at the missions we'll see that a one crate mission gives 20k but costs 2k, leaving us with a net profit of 18k. For 2 crates it's 32k (2x20k-8k) and 3 crate missions take the cake with 42k (3x20k-18k). You'll need to do 37 supply missions before one selling mission, so I'm not considering that one in this equasion. Otherwise it will go down to 40.4k per mission.
Another factor is the lenght of each mission. Crates are mostly confined to Los Santos, only on rare occasion you are leaving the city. Even when soloing the 3 crate missions you often get a vehicle anyways, and if not going back and forth in the city (maybe with a Buzzard, which I'd highly suggest you buy for this) the missions usually aren't that long.
The biggest problem may be that this stuff can get boring after a while and you simply shouldn't sell your product with too many randoms around. Also there's a cooldown between each supply mission which can be bypassed by doing either a headhunter mission (great value) or filling up two warehouses simultaneously.
| Rank | Business | Payout per mission | Lenght of missions | Teamwork |
| 2 | Import/Export | 40k as reference | mid-long to long | Only for selling |
{Spoiler}
To determine the selling price for cars we have to factor in a few things. First up there's a trick to only get top range vehicles. You simply keep one car of each model you don't want to sell and keep the total amount of cars below 32 or 80%. Once you have all standart and mid range cars you'll only get top ones.
With that we can break it down as follows: You get 100k for each car, but with an upfront cost of 20k. So it's a net profit of 40k max, broken up into two missions, sourcing and selling. If we split it towards each mission they give up to 40k each, minus repairs. So far it's easy.
Now there are additional tactics like sourcing a lot of cars and selling them at once, but not as a collection. This is beneficial since the cooldown on selling missions is 20 minutes for the first, but only +10 minutes for each additional car. And more time between sales means you can do something else. And you make more money per mission if you are selling multiple cars at once (unless it's quit pro quo).
And then there are collections. Note that only the ones that only contain top range cars are giving you more money than selling the same amount of top range cars in a non-collection group. However the occasional sale of the forst or last collection will give you and each of your associates a pretty decent bonus.
So yeah, 40k is a decent regular payout here, it will likely be a bit less since during a lot of these missions you'll get shot at. Also since the missions can take place anywhere on the map a lot of them end up taking a lot of time.
To determine the selling price for cars we have to factor in a few things. First up there's a trick to only get top range vehicles. You simply keep one car of each model you don't want to sell and keep the total amount of cars below 32 or 80%. Once you have all standart and mid range cars you'll only get top ones.
With that we can break it down as follows: You get 100k for each car, but with an upfront cost of 20k. So it's a net profit of 40k max, broken up into two missions, sourcing and selling. If we split it towards each mission they give up to 40k each, minus repairs. So far it's easy.
Now there are additional tactics like sourcing a lot of cars and selling them at once, but not as a collection. This is beneficial since the cooldown on selling missions is 20 minutes for the first, but only +10 minutes for each additional car. And more time between sales means you can do something else. And you make more money per mission if you are selling multiple cars at once (unless it's quit pro quo).
And then there are collections. Note that only the ones that only contain top range cars are giving you more money than selling the same amount of top range cars in a non-collection group. However the occasional sale of the forst or last collection will give you and each of your associates a pretty decent bonus.
So yeah, 40k is a decent regular payout here, it will likely be a bit less since during a lot of these missions you'll get shot at. Also since the missions can take place anywhere on the map a lot of them end up taking a lot of time.
| Rank | Business | Payout per mission | Lenght of missions | Teamwork |
| 3 | Smuggler's Run | 17k | mid-long to long | Selling, sourcing only if not quit pro quo |
{Spoiler}
Okay, this has to be the all time worst business alongside Bikers' document forgery. The reason for this is that R* wanted to make it more appealing for teamplayers, but they also had to balance it in a way that this wouldn't be too profitable.
To break it down properly: You collect crates (again), each crate has a set price of 10k. There are 8 types of goods to choose from, three of which (most left one in the top row) give you 35% bonus for selling 25 (50% of the hangars capacity) and 70% for selling 50 crates of that same type. Also you get one more crate per mission for each person helping you out, up to four crates total. So in theory you can get up to 68k per mission.
That's quite a nice price, the first problem being that you can't source another one right away since the cooldowns are said to increase for each crate sourced (same system as selling cars in Import/Export, but with different values), and to get decent bonuses you will want to only source one type of crate which slows you down immensly. Also if you are doing the missions quit pro quo you may get double the money in one mission, but then a lousy associates payout for the next one making it way more profitable for both players if you just did anything else instead. However if you can find a few people who are perfectly fine with getting the shorter end of the stick this may be a great opportunity.
Also since the missions are quite lenghty I can only suggest you do a few to get some discount prices on the new aircrafts if you are into those.
Okay, this has to be the all time worst business alongside Bikers' document forgery. The reason for this is that R* wanted to make it more appealing for teamplayers, but they also had to balance it in a way that this wouldn't be too profitable.
To break it down properly: You collect crates (again), each crate has a set price of 10k. There are 8 types of goods to choose from, three of which (most left one in the top row) give you 35% bonus for selling 25 (50% of the hangars capacity) and 70% for selling 50 crates of that same type. Also you get one more crate per mission for each person helping you out, up to four crates total. So in theory you can get up to 68k per mission.
That's quite a nice price, the first problem being that you can't source another one right away since the cooldowns are said to increase for each crate sourced (same system as selling cars in Import/Export, but with different values), and to get decent bonuses you will want to only source one type of crate which slows you down immensly. Also if you are doing the missions quit pro quo you may get double the money in one mission, but then a lousy associates payout for the next one making it way more profitable for both players if you just did anything else instead. However if you can find a few people who are perfectly fine with getting the shorter end of the stick this may be a great opportunity.
Also since the missions are quite lenghty I can only suggest you do a few to get some discount prices on the new aircrafts if you are into those.
