Strategic wind farm design is becoming an absolute necessity as the growing population places increased stress on both energy resources and available land. Optimizing wind farm power output requires further understanding of wake effects and complex interactions with the atmospheric boundary layer for different layouts. Particularly, alternating tall and short turbines (vertical staggering) in the streamwise direction could be advantageous by circumventing adverse wake effects while capitalizing on the undisturbed flow. However, in contrast to horizontal staggering, the implementation of vertical staggering is lacking and still relatively unexplored. To investigate this, we have improved upon a simple, top-down, analytical model (Xie et al. Wind Energy 20, 45–62 (2017)) which is applied to fully developed, vertically staggered wind farms. Our model allows us to readily adjust and investigate the influence of important parameters such as rotor diameter, hub height, and turbine spacing, providing information about the optimal layout. The optimal spacing is determined by performing a simple cost analysis, taking the cost of the land and the turbines into account. Then, high-fidelity, large-eddy simulations are used to corroborate the results and give more insight regarding the finite size effects that are not currently captured using the analytical model.