Indeed, "Tegetthoff" and her sister ships were so well received that when the time came to plan for the replacement of Austria-Hungary's old s, the navy elected to simply take the layout of her class and enlarge them to have a slightly greater tonnage and larger main guns. The cost to construct "Tegetthoff" was enormous by the standards of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. While the , , and the "Radetzky"-class battleships cost the navy roughly 18, 26, and 40 million krone per ship, "Tegetthoff" was projected to cost over 60 million krone. Under the previous budgets for 1907 and 1908, the navy had been allocated some 63.4 and 73.4 million krone, which at the time was considered an inflated budget due to the construction of two "Radetzky"s. Montecuccoli worried that the general public and the legislatures in Vienna and Budapest would reject the need for a ship as expensive as "Tegetthoff", especially so soon after the political crisis in Budapest. The dramatic increase in spending meant that in 1909 the navy spent some 100.4 million krone, a huge sum at the time. This was done in order to rush the completion of the "Radetzky"-class battleships, though the looming construction of three other dreadnoughts in addition to "Tegetthoff" meant the Austro-Hungarian Navy would likely have to ask the government for a yearly budget much higher than 100 million krone. In order to guarantee funding for the ship from the Rothschild family in Austria, who owned the Witkowitz Ironworks, the Creditanstalt Bank, and had significant assets in both the Škoda Works and the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, Archduke Franz Ferdinand personally courted Albert Salomon Anselm von Rothschild to obtain his family's monetary support until the government could buy the battleship. Facing potential backlash over constitutional concerns that the construction of "Tegetthoff" committed Austria-Hungary to spend roughly 60 million Kronen without prior approval by either the Austrian Reichsrat or the Diet of Hungary, the deal remained secret. In the event of the agreement being leaked to the press prior to the passage of a new naval budget, Montecuccoli drafted several explanations to justify construction of the battleship and the necessity to keep its existence a secret. These included the navy's urgent need to counter Italy's naval build up and desire to negotiate a lower price with their builders.