Were you ever frustrated by having to calculate the total cost of a crafted item based on its individual components?
Were you ever stumped by the question of how many pieces of Frostweave Cloth (as well as other components) are required to craft a Frostweave Bag?
Have you ever needed to calculate the total number of mats required for a recipe/pattern/schematic/etc on paper or in Excel spreadsheets?
Worry no more. Bank Alt handles all these needs and more. Bank Alt is free (but ad supported) and will remain free.
I am Darth Solo, the blogger behind Wow Alone and I created BankAlt as a tool to help World of Warcraft crafters to easily figure out what goes into a recipe and how much it costs. I came upon this concept back when I had to craft various gadgets for my Dwarf Engineer and we all know how complicated those recipes can get. BankAlt.com makes it very easy to figure all this out. Here's how.
Component Hierarchy. You can view the entire component hierarchy for each recipe in 3 ways:
- Quick Tree - shows a quick hierarchy, useful for checking out components at a glance
- Full Tree w/ Cost - brings up an overlay window with the same component tree, plus the ability to calculate costs
- Link to this recipe - brings up the recipe's own page with cost calculations, which is useful when you want to bookmark that recipe for quick access
Recipe cost calculations. With BankAlt you can quickly calculate how much a recipe will cost you, by entering costs for individual components.
Cost saving. You can save costs for components for later retrieval. Costs are saved to a cookie in your browser so you don't need to create an account.
All crafting professions in WoW (and all recipes) are represented. Mining is also here because there are various bars you can craft.
Recipes can be located easily by searching or filtering for them. For many of us familiar with Wowhead, the interface is similar.
BankAlt can help with your professions and crafting endeavors by eliminating the guesswork from trying to figure out a bill of materials for complex recipes or even simple ones. It helps you maximize profits by offering cost calculations in real time without having to rely on spreadsheets. Finally, BankAlt makes it easy to re-use the costs that you've already entered for any component by allowing you to recall them at a later date.
I hope that BankAlt.com can be useful to all those who dabble in WoW's professions. Suggestions and feedback are welcome, both on my blog and on BankAlt's Contact page. Finally, I'd like to thank Markco for allowing me to present BankAlt here on J2MC, easily the best WoW gold making site on the web. Thank you Markco!
6 comments: on "Newest Free Tool for Wow Bankers"
Deepcut said... May 18, 2011 at 9:59 AM
While this looks handy, I think a spreadsheet is still better simply because you can have everything on one page without a bunch of clicking.
Also, adding the item ID numbers would be nice when making KTQ macros.
Anonymous said... May 18, 2011 at 10:48 AM
Theunderminejournal.com will also tell you what items are needed for a craft and the cheapest way to get there for your server. It also lets you choose which steps you want to use by just clicking once. For example Pyrium bars can be purchased/smelted/transmuted. One click will switch from one to the next giving you the total cost.
For EU players bankalt.com is still likely your best option.
Anonymous said... May 18, 2011 at 6:33 PM
I like TUJ but...it prices cost based on current components. If my cost for bars/cloth is 2g ea and it's currently selling at 5g, I have to recalc it anyway. Of course, I also get to see it and try to figure out which is a better plan, selling my mats back or not lol.
Darth Solo said... May 18, 2011 at 8:52 PM
@Deepcut a spreadsheet has its uses, I agree, but can it show you the list of materials? It might be possible to program that sort of functionality (I don't know, I'm not an Excel wizard) but not everyone has that level of skill.
"Also, adding the item ID numbers would be nice when making KTQ macros." I'm not sure I understand what you are saying, unless... if you are looking for the item id, that can be found if you click "Link to this recipe". The id will be in the url. Would it be useful for you if it were shown on the page also?
@Aeg TUJ is really cool, I just wish I'd thought of that before they did haha but from what I can tell, you can't enter your own costs (it just uses the scanned prices) and BankAlt shows the materials hierarchy in a more intuitive way (IMO).
Scanned costs are good if you buy all your mats from the AH but many crafters might get theirs from other channels, such as trade chat or direct trade with someone. Hence, their costs might be much lower than TUJ's scans. In cases such as these, BankAlt.com might make more sense.
@Anon, yup, just what I said above.
Thanks for checking BankAlt.com out guys and also a big thanks to Markco for letting me announce it on his blog!
Oh and I appreciate constructive criticism and feedback.
Darth Solo said... May 18, 2011 at 9:25 PM
OK some of you have left suggestions on BankAlt.com and some of them are very good. I will address them here:
- Prices for vendor-bought items (such as fluxes, threads, etc) should be automatically populated. That's a great idea and I should have thought of that from the beginning. A small issue here is how to deal with reputation discounts. Any suggestions? I could always default to Neutral reputation (e.g. highest price).
- Cooking is missing. I will add Cooking as soon as I can. It is missing because originally BankAlt was supposed to do something completely different, which didn't involve Cooking.
- Allow the user to pick their server and populate prices automatically from Theunderminejournal. This is a very intriguing proposition. It wouldn't be easy to implement but it is doable. I won't promise anything but it is definitely food for thought.
Thanks for the great suggestions guys and thanks for visiting BankAlt!
GrayzBDF said... May 22, 2011 at 7:53 AM
Sounds great! I'll try it out now.
Keep it up.
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