Why would anyone buy a rack?

[Skiploder]

To echo what others have stated, depending on the type of racks you prefer, once you start needing them in serious numbers, it can be much more cost-effective in terms of materials, time, and labor to buy racks made by a professional caging company. Same goes if you need a specialty size rack or tub.

My husband & I can & have built nice, functional racks in the past, but we prefer to buy them from Animal Plastics instead. The good folks at AP have better experience, better equipment, better resources for materials and get them done more efficiently than we could. The racks are all precision built, uniform & look great. Not to mention, we'd rather spend that time down in our snake rooms caring for and enjoying our pythons, instead of out in the garage building racks. Besides, we feel our snakes deserve the best enclosures we are able to provide, and to us that means buying them from a professional enclosure builder.

It's all a matter of where and how you want to spend your time and money and efforts. Just because people do it differently than you certainly doesn't mean they're getting robbed or haven't put any thought into it.

Yep.

Made my own PVC rack a few months ago. 1/2" PVC purchased at TAP plastics. No charge for the cuts.

Bought my heat tape through RBI and the tubs at Target.

In the end I saved a whopping $40 on something that would have cost me about $450 through AP or the like.

After spending all the time gathering the materials, and all the time putting things together, I concluded that it would have been worth MY time coughing up an extra $40 and having someone else ship one to me.

As for the Freedom Breeder and ARS style rack - my old man is a welder. After pricing out the materials, there was little to no savings in having him weld one up for me.

One thing to keep in mind is that these dedicated cage and rack builders get volume material discounts that most of us don't get. An example of this is when I priced out building my own 3'x4'x2' PVC cage - the cost of having AP or ProLine build me a custom cage was essentially the same.

I guess if I were to compare those costs to DIY melamine costs it would appear as if I the cage builders were making a fortune. However that's and apples to orange comparison.