I was trolling on the Internet a while back and something about the cost of the Death Star didn't really sit right with me. Specifically I saw a statement that the Star Destroyer fleet cost more than the Death Star. The canon number for the Death Star is around 1 trillion credits. ISDs cost 150 million credits apiece. With 25,000 of them, the Empire would have spent 3.75 trillion credits on their Star Destroyer fleet. So yeah, if we go by the official numbers (and I believe there may be reason not to^(1)), the ISD fleet did cost almost 4 times more. But there's another aspect of this that you probably hadn't considered: the crews have to get paid! So how much money would the Empire spend giving these poor fools their paychecks?
Firstly, the exact number for the crew of an ISD is 9,235 officers, 27,850 crew, and 9,700 stormtroopers, for a grand total of 46,785 people per ISD. This can be expected to vary slightly, but I'll consider it an average. The entire ISD fleet therefore has 1.17 billion people living on them. It's difficult to imagine how much they might get paid, because goods in Star Wars have some really wonky prices: for example, blaster rifles and pistols frequently go for between 1,000 and 3,000 credits. But on the other hand, Luke said in A New Hope that 10,000 credits is almost enough to buy his own ship, and the Millennium Falcon itself goes for 100,000 credits new. When you consider the difference in size and complexity between a blaster rifle and an interstellar freighter, it really boggles the mind how the difference in price can be so small.
In any case, Imperial Navy personnel probably don't earn enough money in a year to buy a freighter. If we assume that the average Imperial "sailor" is paid between 1,000 and 10,000 credits per year, then the cost of paying everyone on the ISD fleet is between 1.17 trillion and 11.7 trillion credits per year, which makes the entire cost of building the Death Star seem like lunch money.
[1]: Of course there are questions as to why the Death Star only costs as much as 6,700 ISDs, when it literally has the same volume as millions. Even if you account for the Death Star being mostly hollow, it's at least tens of thousands times the volume of an ISD. The material the Death Star's hull is made of (quadanium steel) is also unbelievably tough, as seen when the Executor rammed the DS2 and did no noticeable damage. It probably costs far more to make quadanium steel than whatever durasteel-type sh
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