You can make a sufficient income for most things just regularly doing your roulettes as adventurer in need. The in need bonus is almost as big as the actual clear (including mob money, if applicable) + roulette bonus.

Doing ventures on retainers, well...you probably can't have a decently leveled gathering/crafting retainer and the battlecraft retainers are reaaally hit or miss, but it does help a little.
That aside, you have to get lucky with boss drops. Minions, mats etc can all be turned into profit. The aetherstones and orchestrion rolls from the coils also went over the table for some good coin recently, materia V prices unfortunately dropped quite a bit.
Also, battlecraft temple leves can reward items that (on Balmung) sell for up to 40k at times. It's not much, but it helps, especially if you'd otherwise just be sitting on your leves.

If you want to make even more, you can play the market board game of buy low, sell high. That requires quite a bit of insight and tracking, tho.


All of those work for making some coin to fuel your glamour/relic needs. It's typically not much on its own, but it compounds. If you want to make big money, I'm afraid there's no way around crafting and gathering. Just one example: Grade 1 alchemy prisms sell for 2000+ on the MB. Blue landtrap leaf costs 128, a clear prism 200, rock salt and quicksilver about 10gil each, all easily procurable from a vendor. Add 100gil for crystals, 40 more for shards and you're left at 488 gil production cost. That's 1500 gil profit for clicking "synthesize", then hitting "careful synthesis II". You just can't beat that as DoW/DoM.