I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, so feel free to move this if it's misplaced, but I wanted to ask this question before posting in the suggestions forum.

There's been a lot of talk lately about getting more money into the site, so I was wondering, how are the prices for CSC items determined?

The reason I ask is because I've only ever purchased CSC once, when there was an item that I felt particularly attached to. I'm on a really limited budget, and generally can't justify spending $5 on a single digital item. Spending $1 each on five different items though, I can see myself ending up doing. I realize that ultimately it winds up with me spending the same amount of my limited budget, but at first glance, that $1 seems super affordable and more appealing, and if I'm honest with myself, I'd probably buy a whole bunch of $1 items for my HA over time. Maybe this has been thoroughly researched and I'm the odd one out though, which is why I'm asking.

Probably by their rarity and potential popularity, though I don't know for sure. The best thing is always just to wait for sales, since prices get slashed in wonderful ways! You have an excellent point, though, but I think enough people have enough money to pay for substantial amounts of CSC, otherwise the custom item system probably wouldn't float.

each and every CS item costs the site money to create and administer. There's an item that costs 1CSC. This was Suggested zillions and billions of time, but really it's worth .01USD which won't buy you anything in the United States, the metal to make up the coin costs MORE than the coin is worth so you'd do better to melt the coin down and sell the ingot than use it. TPTB were very resistant to creating this item but in the end were spending more admin time saying no...

Whether or not any item is 100CSC or not used to be the determiner as to whether or not you got a bobblehead. So there used to be a compelling administrative reason to price things at 100 so that buyers were rewarded and so the number of 1CSC etc. junk items being sold would be minimized. I know that folks used to buy so many Ooh La Layers just to get the bobbleheads and not because they want to dress up. OLLs were DIRT CHEAP in sP and I am just starting to run out of these extra ones I bought from them for sP two years ago.

[edit] Oh yeah, before the CW feature was implemented, users used to sell CSC for only 8MsP. It was much easier to buy it from other players.