Gacha Pity, Explained: What the Pull Actually Costs

The published rate implies 167 pulls. Pity caps you at 90. And if the banner has a 50/50, the real worst case is 180.

The published rate is not what a copy costs

At a 0.6% rate, the raw arithmetic says you should average about 167 pulls per copy.

Then you read the pity rules and find a hard cap at 90.

Those two numbers are not close, and the second one wins. The cap is not a safety net for unlucky players — it is roughly half the number the base rate implies, so for almost everybody it arrives first. Quoting the published rate as though it describes your experience overstates the cost by about double.

Your details

Published rate per pull(%)

For the SPECIFIC item you want, not the rarity tier. A 0.6% tier can mean 0.3% for the featured character.

Hard pity - guaranteed at this pull(pulls)

From your game's published rules. No pity system at all? Use the drop chance calculator instead - this tool is about the cap.

Pulls already on this banner(pulls)

Your pity counter. It usually resets on a win and often carries between banners - check your game's rules.

What one pull costs you($)

Real money, not tokens. Work it out once from the bundle you actually buy and every figure below becomes a price.

Result

Pulls until a copy is guaranteed

From where your counter is now. A ceiling, not an estimate - you cannot exceed it.

Cost to guarantee from hereThe number worth deciding on. Everything else is commentary.: $180.00
Chance it drops before you reach pityA FLOOR, because soft pity is not modelled. Under half means reaching the cap is the normal outcome, not bad luck.: 41.8%
Worst case for the FEATURED item, from zeroLose the 50/50 and the next guarantee is usually forced to the featured item - so the real ceiling is two full pity runs.: 180
Worst case cost for the featured itemThis is the figure to compare against your budget - not the single-pity cost.: $360.00
What the base rate alone would implyIgnoring pity entirely. Compare it with the cap - for most games the published rate overstates the cost badly, because the cap arrives first.: 167

Open the Gacha Pity & Pull Cost Calculator on its own page to bookmark or share it.

Reaching pity is the normal outcome

On the defaults — 0.6%, pity at 90 — the chance of winning before the cap is:


Drops before pity	41.8%
Reaches the cap	58.2%

So going the distance is not bad luck. It is the majority experience, and it is what the system is built to produce. Which means the honest question about a banner is not "what are my odds" but "am I willing to pay the capped price" — because that is the price most people pay.

At 90 pulls and $2 a pull, that is $180.

⚠️ The 50/50 is where budgets break

Here is the part that catches people out.

In many games, hitting pity guarantees an item of the top rarity — not the featured one. It is a coin flip between the character you want and something from the standard pool. Lose that flip, and most games then force the next guaranteed pull to be the featured item.

So the real ceiling for the thing you are actually chasing is two full pity runs:

	Pulls	Cost at $2
Guarantee a copy	90	$180
Guarantee the FEATURED item	180	$360

People budget for the first number, lose the coin flip, and meet the second one mid-banner — the worst possible moment to be revising a budget. The tool reports it separately for exactly that reason.

If your game guarantees the featured item outright at pity, untick the box and the worst case halves.

Your counter is probably not at zero

The pity counter usually carries between banners, and often the 50/50 state does too — lose the flip on one banner and the next featured pull can already be guaranteed.

That is why the tool asks how many pulls you already have. At 75 pulls in, the picture is completely different:


Pulls until guaranteed	15
Cost from here	$30
Chance it drops before pity	8.6%

A banner that looked like a $180 decision is a $30 one. Both of these are published rules rather than secrets — check yours before assuming you are starting fresh.

⚠️ The odds shown are a floor, not a guess

Many games use soft pity: sharply raising the rate over the last stretch before the cap, so real players usually win somewhat short of it.

Those curves are rarely published as formulas, and this calculator will not invent one — a confident-sounding made-up curve would be worse than an honest bound. So treat "chance it drops before pity" as at least this likely. Where your game does publish its soft pity behaviour, trust that over this.

Check which rate you are reading

Games usually publish a rate for the rarity tier, then a share of that for the featured item.

A "0.6%" headline can mean 0.3% for the character you are chasing, with the rest going to others in the pool. "Rate-up" almost always means a larger share of an already-small chance, not a separate roll.

Why cost per pull is the number that matters

Gacha currencies exist to keep the money abstract — bundles that never divide evenly into pulls, several currencies at once, bonus amounts on a first purchase.

Work out once what a single pull costs you in real money, and every figure above turns from a token count into a price. A price is something you can compare against everything else you might do with the money. That one conversion is the most clarifying step here.

Is this the drop chance calculator again?

No — and it used to be a fair question, which is exactly why this tool changed.

The Drop Chance Calculator handles pure independent chance: every attempt identical, no memory, no ceiling. That is how loot tables work in most games.

This one is about a cap. A pity system is not independent at all, because the game is counting — and once a guarantee exists, the cap dominates the answer while the raw probability becomes close to irrelevant.

No pity system in your game? Use the drop chance calculator. It is the right tool, and this one will mislead you.

What is still true underneath

The pity counter is real, because the game genuinely tracks it. The feeling that a run of failures makes the next pull more likely is not — underneath, each pull stays independent unless your game publishes soft pity. The rate on your fortieth failed pull is the same as on your first.

That is worth naming because gacha interfaces — counters, animations, near-misses — are built to make the opposite feeling easy to hold, and that feeling is the expensive one.

The one number you control

Nothing in this arithmetic responds to how much you want the outcome, how close you feel, or how much you have already spent. There is no such thing as being due.

Work out the worst-case cost for the featured item. Decide away from the banner screen whether that is money you are willing to spend. Then treat it as spent the moment you commit it.