Quick answer: Desynthesis makes gil by buying an item cheaply, breaking it down, and selling the materials for more than you paid. It pays when the expected value of the mats (given random yields and your desynth level) beats the item's cost plus tax. Some gear and furnishings reliably break into pricey materials — those are the ones to target.
Desynthesis destroys an item and gives you materials back. Most players treat it as a way to clean out an armoury chest. Treated properly it's a manufacturing business in reverse: you're buying a cheap finished good because the sum of its parts sells for more than it does.
Desynthesis unlocks with a short quest once one of your Disciples of the Hand reaches level 30. From then on each crafting class carries its own desynthesis skill level, and each class can only break down the kinds of items it makes — your Armorer's skill has nothing to do with your Alchemist's.
Three rules matter for profit:
Because the output is a draw, single attempts tell you nothing. What matters is expected value across a batch:
The 0.95 is the market board's 5% tax on whatever you sell afterwards. The "average value of a draw" is the part people skip — they see one expensive material in the result list and assume that's the payout. It isn't. If a source yields one of four materials and only one of them is valuable, your expected return is roughly a quarter of that headline number.
Three categories, in descending order of reliability:
Our desynthesis tool covers 1,851 marketable source items and the materials each one can return, priced live against your world so you can see the spread before you destroy anything.
Early skill levels are where people lose money, because low-level items return low-value materials no matter what. Treat the climb as a cost of entry and keep it cheap: feed it the free gear you're already accumulating rather than buying fodder, and push one class at a time so you actually reach a useful skill level in the category you care about instead of being mediocre at five.
Put this into practice with live market-board prices for your world:
Price desynthesis on your world → Crafting for profit →
XIV Profitability is a free, fan-made tool. Not affiliated with Square Enix. Prices via Universalis. FINAL FANTASY XIV © SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.