Comparison

ISP Tycoon vs Minimum Effort

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

ISP Tycoon

Features
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Start with a few streets. Build the network an entire city depends on. ISP Tycoon is a hands-on business strategy simulation where you design and operate an internet provider cable by cable. Place poles and hubs, connect homes and businesses, choose copper or fiber, and turn growing demand into a profitable telecom network. Expansion creates opportunity—and pressure. A cheap route may save cash today but become tomorrow's bottleneck. Poor coverage costs customers. Congestion and outages hurt satisfaction and reputation. Every upgrade is a trade-off between capacity, reliability, and profit. BUILD THE NETWORK • Plan routes across streets, neighborhoods, and varied terrain. • Connect homes, shops, offices, and corporate customers. • Deploy copper, fiber, hubs, data centers, and high-capacity backbones. • Watch traffic move through the infrastructure you designed. RUN THE BUSINESS • Track cash, daily revenue, operating costs, customers, and reputation. • Invest where demand is growing and expand without overbuilding. • Add capacity before overloaded routes slow the entire operation. • Resolve support problems and protect service quality. MASTER 14 CAREER OPERATIONS Grow from your first neighborhood to Fiber Capital through 14 career maps. Adapt your strategy to dense cities, coasts, deserts, mountains, valleys, and islands. Each operation tests coverage, efficiency, quality, and financial control. BUILD WITHOUT LIMITS Take what you learned into Sandbox mode, design larger networks, optimize every route, and create the ISP you want. If you enjoy tycoon games, business management, logistics, city building, and network optimization, ISP Tycoon gives you a company where every cable matters. Start small. Connect every building. Can you scale the network without losing control? --- ISP Tycoon is a fictional single-player strategy and logistics simulation game for entertainment. It does not provide or facilitate real-world internet or telecom services.

About

Minimum Effort

Features
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You have a job. You do not want to do it. Minimum Effort is a satirical workplace strategy game. Every workday runs from 09:00 to 17:00, and everything you can do with those 480 minutes trades three things against each other: the time it saves you, the output it actually produces, and how conspicuous it makes you. The goal is not to be good at your job. It is to find the least amount of work that survives. HOW A DAY WORKS • Do the work, fake the work, or avoid it entirely. Looking busy covers part of a shortfall when the boss checks the deliverables. It never files the report. • The boss patrols the floor. When he walks past in the middle of something you get a couple of seconds to look busy . and less time the hotter you already are. • Repeat an act and it gets riskier every time. The fourth bathroom break is not the first bathroom break. • Colleagues talk. Each one has their own trust in you and their own doubts, and a rumour that crosses the floor twice reaches the boss's office from a direction you were not watching. THE PEOPLE Your accomplice will cover for you. The overachiever notices an unearned win. The snitch keeps a note of when people leave their desk. The gossip has already told two other people. You can chat, delegate your work, ask somebody to cover, genuinely help them . or put your name on their work, which they never forget. PROMOTIONS ARE A TRAP Every rung on the ladder pays more and expects more. Getting promoted is easy. Staying just competent enough not to be fired, one rung higher, with a bigger quota and the same amount of effort . that is the game. FIVE CAREERS - Corporate. Easy. Meetings, decks and a quarterly review nobody reads. - Startup. Chaotic. Twelve people, no structure, and everybody notices everything. - Consulting. Medium. Frameworks, workstreams, and never being the one with the answer. - Investment banking. Extreme. Enormous money, enormous work, and an associate who never leaves. - Home office. Nobody can see you and everything is measured. The green dot is your new boss and it cannot be charmed. Corporate and Startup are included. Consulting and Investment Banking are unlocked together by the Career Pack. Home Office is its own pack. Both are one purchase each, not a subscription, nothing recurring, and either one removes the advertising. THE ONLY SCORE THAT MATTERS Total money earned, divided by hours you actually worked. Retire at the top of a ladder having been paid for years and worked for weeks, and the number on your record board will say so. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account and no sign-in. No server of ours. Your careers are saved on your device and nothing about them leaves it. It does show advertising, which Google's ad kit loads over the network, and either pack removes it. Minimum Effort is a work of satire. The offices, the colleagues and the careers are invented, and nothing in it is advice about a real job.

Screenshots

ISP Tycoon4 screens
Minimum Effort4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: ISP Tycoon at none against Minimum Effort's 1. ISP Tycoon also leads on device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Minimum Effort sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. ISP Tycoon asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

ISP Tycoon ships an update weekly, Minimum Effort every 5 days. The most recent releases landed on September 30, 2026 and October 12, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences · 3 level
ISP Tycoon versus Minimum Effort: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterISP TycoonMinimum Effort
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyWeeklyEvery 5 days — better
AdsYesYes
In-app purchasesNo — betterYes
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod — betteriPhone
Requires iOS15.0 — better17.0
Further details — not scored
Size182 MB7 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperDaniel Souza do ValeLevin David Schwab

In-app purchases

None

ISP Tycoon

No in-app purchases

1 purchases

Minimum Effort

One-time1
  • Career Pack$3.99

Questions

Is ISP Tycoon free?
ISP Tycoon is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Minimum Effort free?
Minimum Effort is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do ISP Tycoon or Minimum Effort have ads?
Both ISP Tycoon and Minimum Effort show ads.
Which is updated more often, ISP Tycoon or Minimum Effort?
ISP Tycoon ships an update weekly, and Minimum Effort every 5 days. Most recently, ISP Tycoon was updated on September 30, 2026 and Minimum Effort on October 12, 2026.

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