Should You Grind It or Pay for It?
Compare the price of a shortcut against what the free path would actually cost you, in your own time.
Use the same unit in both fields — e.g. target 10,000 and rate 2,000/hour both in gems, not one in gems and one in dollars.
Grind: $90.00
Put a Price on the Shortcut
Start with what the shortcut actually costs: the price tag, how much of that resource or progress you need, and how much of it you can earn in an hour without paying. Those three numbers are all it takes to know how many hours the free path would take — the moment you change one, the grind time above updates with it.
Give Your Time a Number
The grind isn’t free just because it doesn’t cost money. To compare it fairly against a price tag, it needs a dollar value too. If you already know what you want to use, enter it directly. If not, switch to “Calculate from your income” and it’s worked out from your annual income, hours worked per week, and weeks worked per year.
Two Costs, Side by Side
Once both sides have a dollar number, the Pay and Grind cards show them next to each other, and the comparison bars put them on the same scale so the gap is visible at a glance. A $9.99 pack that would otherwise take 5 hours of grinding costs $90 in time at an $18-an-hour rate — in a case like that, paying saves $80.01, because the shortcut price is a small fraction of what the free path actually costs once your time is counted. Change the rate and the verdict updates instantly; there’s no button to press.
Where the Decision Flips
The break-even rate answers a different question than the headline comparison: at what hourly value would the two paths cost exactly the same? Above that rate, paying is the cheaper option for you. Below it, grinding is. The same number, read the other way, is the cost per hour of grinding you’d be skipping by paying — useful if you’d rather think in terms of what each hour is worth than in a lump-sum dollar amount.
How Much of Your Week It Takes
Total grind hours rarely match how much time you’re actually willing to give up in a given week. Enter how much grinding you’re genuinely willing to do and a timeline appears below, with a tick for every week that pace would take. Leave it blank and the timeline stays out of the way; type 0 and it tells you plainly that grinding isn’t part of your plan at that pace, rather than pretending nothing was entered.
The calculator doesn’t decide which path is right for you. It simply puts a dollar value on the time involved, so the two paths can be compared on the same terms.