BPOs versus BPCs and an early mistake

 A while ago I did a post on an experiment manufacturing by sitting in Jita, buying BPCs on contract, building them in place and selling for profit. This demonstrated the profitability of doing things in the most cost inefficient way, and was something I intended to implement. It also showcased the other advantage of BPCs, that being flexibility. I could easily switch what I was manufacturing to what I found profitable, and wasn't limited to any blueprint library I happened to have.  

I then started this challenge and immediately forgot about all of that and bought a bunch of BPOs. Low value ones, and profitable even without research, but still. This has 2 problems. One; as mentioned, the limitations of flexibility, and two; All that money in BPOs is sat there doing nothing when those BPOs aren't being used. As the library grows I would effectively have a ever growing pile of assets sitting there doing nothing to grow my net worth. Also you have a break even point with BPOs, which isn't so bad for small ammo blueprints worth a few hundred thousand, but for bigger blueprints the BPO break even point could be several thousand runs, which I'm unlikely to ever do from a single blueprint.

I've started to correct that, and bought a couple of BPCs to use in the Raitaru in Ikuchi to build from. In doing so, I found a nice looking rig blueprint that looks nicely profitable, and would use up my last free slot and most of my available capital. Perfect.

You can't see the popup on hover over but it says "Activity requirement not met". Essentially I don't have the skills to use the blueprint. Damn. Injecting those skills cost me almost half a million and will take about 9 hours to learn. An annoying mistake but a relatively low cost learning point. Something to keep an eye on in the future!