Base Price of Glyphs

I thought I'd a post out there for all the struggling Inscriptionists trying to make a living since another golden era of coin making has tapered off as the glyph market becomes stable after patch 4.0.1. Also, for my friend Moordenar, who is resistant to the idea of glyphs costing more than 10g.

First some basic assumptions from the current economy on Dath'Remar.

Market Prices:

Ink of the Sea (IotS): 4g50s
Snowfall Ink (SI): 9g
Adder's Tongue: 1g - 1g50s

Finally herb prices are dropping significantly enough to really start cranking out some inks.

Yield from millling Adder's Tongue

 I have tested the results of milling Adder's Tongue over 382 mills (yes, that's 1910 herbs and about 2k gold worth at the time) have have:
IotS/Mill: 1.48
SI/Mill: .25

Remember, that is ink per mill, not pigment.

Total Market Value of one Mill

Using the current market values, 6g68s worth of IotS and 2g27s worth of SI for a total of 8g95. So the markup on the 5g of herbs (at 1g/ea) from milling is 79%.

If you've ever annoyed your wife by continuously hitting a key (with the edge of the WoW window barely visible in the corner of the screen) while you are watching some TV together... that's really not a whole lot. However, this morning there was only 40 IotS at or below that market price, and I could plonk down over 2k gold for Adder's Tongue that would net me over 640 IotS, you just gotta mill those herbs.

Getting to the cost of Ink of the Sea

Now that I have the value of a single mill, and the relative value of both products, I can jam that back into the total cost of a single mill (5g @ 1g/ea for herbs) and divide by the yield to get:
Cost of IotS: 2g51s
Cost of SI: 5g03s

So milling herbs is generally significantly cheaper than the current market price of inks. Good news. Now how about those glyphs?

The mark up on Glyphs

A glyph costs at most 1 Resilient Parchment (40s) and 3 IotS (2g51s) for a total of 7g94s. So what's a reasonable markup based on getting those herbs at 1g/ea? I'm going to propose that if you buy a glyph for less than 16g, please send your Inscriptionist a lovely thankyou note.

Time is Money, Friend! Purchasing herbs, milling them, creating the inks, scanning the AH, selecting which glyphs to make, making those glyphs, listing them on the AH, getting the 90% of your glyphs that don't sell out of the mail and relisting those glyphs takes a lot of time. Even with with a slick set up, lots of delightful addons and maximising your AFK time for parts of the process, it's reasonably involved.

So it's only recently that the herb prices have dropped this low on Dath'Remar, and now that many toons have their glyph requirements sorted, things have certainly stabilised. I currently have over 500 glyphs on the AH, and aside from Glyph of the Wild.... my most expensive glyph is only 31g42s with the majority sitting squarely in that 15 - 25g range, which is what I'd like to call a modest mark up for much needed service to all of Azeroth.