making money from pythons

[ace_singapore]

Keeping and breeding BP to make profit = infinite hope
keeping and breeding BP for the passion = endless fun

[mykee]

Sure, there is still money to be made. But nowhere NEAR the amount that was available to be made when these animals were in thier "prime" back in the later 90's and early 2000's.
Example: when I bought my first male spider back in 2002, they were $8000. I got seven clutches from my one male the following season, producing 39 eggs and 21 spiders. They sold for $6000 each at the time (had I sold them all). That's a profit of $118,000 on an initial investment of $8000.
That's just spiders.
Pastels, mojaves, etc. same deal.
Those days are gone.

Now, in order to make money;
1. You NEED to breed your own rodents.
I keep roughly 80 ball pythons these days and breed almost enough rats to maintain my entire collection. I spend roughly $450 a year on bedding, and another $650 on high quality rat lab diet. That eleven hundred dollars yields me roughly 5000 rats per annum, or 22 cents per rat; roughly a tenth the cost if I were to buy them even wholesale.
2. You need to start out with triple and quad animals, both co-dom and recessive. Note: I said animalS, not animal. Putting all your eggs (so to speak)in one basket on a single high dollar animal is foolish. Great way to hemmorhage money.
3. ZERO normals.
In order to keep your heating, bedding and misc. expenses down, you need to hold as small a number of breeding stock as you can, while still optimizing your potential for high dollar value animals. All these breeders who have hundreds of breeder animals with a bunch of normal females; crazy. They're in debt.
Where is the intelligence on heating and feeding a bunch of normal females all year to get a clutch that has a bunch of normals in it? When you're breeding doubles, triple and quads to double, triples and quads, you'll likely produce zero normals thereby increasing the dollar value of your average clutch.

Like every other business, there are tons of stupid people who try to make tons of money on ball pythons in this economy.
Like every other business, only the ones who have a plan succeed.
Be smart, have a plan and you can make a bunch of money.

[majorleaguereptiles]

Lets say this year I buy a '10 banana male for $15k.

I know it was hypothetical, but banana male for 15K?! You let your provider know I'll buy them all at that price.