What maxing a Blue Archive student actually costs
About 48.2 million credits and 721 Eleph for a 3★ student — and near-identical for every student. What changes is which materials you farm, not how much you pay.
Taking a 3★ Blue Archive student all the way — ★5, every skill maxed, unique weapon fully upgraded — costs 48,217,500 credits and 721 Eleph. The striking part is how little that varies: across all 267 students the credit bill runs only from 48,217,500 to 48,767,500, and the Eleph bill depends on nothing but the star a student starts at. Which student you invest in barely changes the price. It changes which materials you go and farm.
Where the money goes
Using Aru as the worked example — a 3★ student who also has a gear tier:
- Stars, up to ★5 — 1,200,000 credits and 220 Eleph. A student only pays for the stars above the one she arrives at.
- EX skill, Lv.1 → 5 — 13,580,000 credits. The four steps are 80k / 500k / 3 million / 10 million: the last upgrade alone is more than the other three together.
- The other three skills, Lv.1 → 10 — 8,812,500 credits each, so 26,437,500 all told. More on this below, because it is the easiest number on the page to misread.
- Unique weapon, ★2 → ★5 — 7,000,000 credits and 501 Eleph.
- Gear — 500,000 credits, and only for the students who have a gear tier at all (66 of 267).
That comes to 48,717,500 credits and 721 Eleph for Aru.
The EX skill's final level costs 10,000,000 credits. That one upgrade is 21% of the student's entire bill.
The three-times trap
A student's page lists her skill costs once per distinct price. Her Basic, Enhanced and Sub skills cost the same at every level, so they appear as a single row — "Basic / Enhanced / Sub skill Lv.4 → 5" — rather than three identical ones.
That is the honest way to list it, and it is easy to read as a total when it is not. You pay that ladder three times, once per skill. The 8.8 million credits shown is one skill's worth; maxing all three costs 26.4 million. Add up the skill rows as printed and you get 22.4 million credits; the real skill bill is 40 million.
Why the total is flat, and what actually differs
Credit prices are shared across the roster; the materials are not. Aru spends Gehenna Tech Notes and Blu-rays plus the Rohonc Codex Page artifact line; Airi spends Trinity ones plus the Phaistos Disc Piece line.
Count the distinct recipes per skill level and the shape is clear. The two lowest levels have exactly 15 recipes across all 267 students — one per school, because they want nothing but that school's Tech Notes. From Lv.3 → 4 the student's own artifact enters the recipe and the count jumps to 196; from Lv.4 → 5 through Lv.8 → 9 it is 263–264 per level, very nearly one bill per student. Then the final step, Lv.9 → 10, collapses to 1 recipe: 4,000,000 credits and a Secret Tech Note, the same for everyone.
So the planning question in Blue Archive is never "who is cheapest" — nobody is. It is "which artifact line am I already sitting on", and that is a farming question, answered by the where-to-farm index rather than by a cost table. The stat calculator shows what the investment buys.
Eleph, and the one number that looks wrong
Eleph are student-specific shards, and they are the genuinely scarce half of the bill. The total depends only on a student's starting star: 721 for the 206 students who arrive at 3★, 801 for the 24 at 2★, and 831 for the 37 at 1★. Credits are farmable; Eleph for a particular student are gated behind pulling her again, the Eligma shop, or her banner.
One figure is worth flagging rather than quietly passing on. The unique weapon's ★5 step costs 2,500,000 credits and 1 Eleph — against 120, 180 and 200 for the three steps before it. That is the same for every student on the roster, so it is not one student's quirk; but a top tier that cheap next to the ones below it looks like a value nobody has tuned yet. Treat it as provisional and expect it to move.
What this is for
The practical use is not the grand total, which you will never pay in one go. It is knowing the shape of the curve: the first skill levels are cheap enough to take on any student you like, and everything expensive sits in the last steps of each track — the EX skill's Lv.4 → 5, the ★5, the weapon's final stars. Those are the decisions worth being deliberate about, and they are the same decisions for every student on the roster.
Every figure here is exact. Each student's full itemised bill — every step, with the exact materials, in English, Japanese and Korean — is on her own page.