Many natural metabolic networks organize into a market-like metabolic communities: individuals compartmentalize (=divide) costs to run metabolism and co-live exchanging metabolic goods, or resources. We learnt a lot about economy inside a cell by over 15 years of studying “nomadic” microbes in monocultures – but are the same principles applicable to metabolic economies? If so, what are the objectives, and which constraints do these systems face? In this talk I will provide a short summary of the economic logic we apply to single metabolic networks. The corner piece to obtain a rulebook of distributed metabolic systems, I believe, is defining the balance between investments and returns. I will present my vision on how to master this balance using a synergy of theory and experiments, and how the idea builds on decision making inside individual cells. Outside the fundamental interest in their inner workings, I share the hope that this research would enable engineering multi-scale complex metabolic communities: from building synthetic organelles in novel microbial cell factories to engineered microbial- and microbe-higher eukaryote communities.