How much money will it cost you to care for 30 hatchlings for 3-4 years until you can breed them and start seeing a return on investment?


Food
Once a week feeding, 30 snakes, 52 weeks in a year X4 years of food before your first litters
That's 6240 food items before you can breed your snakes.
If you spend on average of $1.00 per food item, you are looking at:
$6240 in food.

Plus your heating for the racks over 4 years
6 watt/ft of 3 inch heat tape.
30 tubs using about 1/2 ft a tub
15 ft X 6 watts = 90 watts X 24 hours = 2160 watt hours per day = 2.16 kw hours per day
.09 cents per kw hour
.09 X 2.16 = $0.1944 per day X 30 = $5.83per month X 4 YEARS = $279.84
$279.84 for the 4 years in electric.

(that's in a perfect world, where there is no heat escape, and your AC bill is NOT calculated in that. Your AC in other rooms will be working harder to counteract the Heating that is leaking into your house from your snake room.)

Rack Investment
Plus the amount of money you spent on racks (and amount of interest that money could have been making in the bank for that 4 years, or in a quicker investment).
$5000 in racks,
(Min of $350 profit over the 4 years in an CD at 1.70% apy compounded daily)


Snake investment
Amount of money spent on snakes that could be invested
Min of $400


What's your time worth cleaning weekly and feeding weekly for 4 years?
(say your time is worth min wadge ($7.25/hour). It takes 2 hours a week to clean everything)
52/weeks X 4/years X $7.25/hour
$1508.00

Start up cost 30 snakes at $200 each = $6000
Racks for the snakes $5000
Heat tape, 15 ft of 3 in = $35.00
Amount of money from the list above: $8777.84
So in the 4 years waiting for the ball pythons to reach breeding age, you would have spent MIN of:
$19812.00 NOT INCLUDING BEDDING, WATER DISHES, TONGS, OTHER MISC SUPPLIES

You’re probably looking at 20k in the first 4 years buying hatchlings, with a profit of 25K IF YOU ARE LUCKY!!!!!

You probably won’t profit until the following year.