Will I lose money breeding ball pythons?

[Ryan Chin]

If you buy into quality, you can produce quality and get a faster ROI, but if you buy into "pet" quality, you will get a lot slower ROI. The Market is good in some areas, but harsh in others. If you want to break even, you're not asking too much and should be able to break even each year with your clutches from 3-5 females, after considering the amount of food it takes to get them to size, heating them, and providing caging / substrate, etc.

Don't breed into the market though, always breed into your passion. Get animals you're excited about, and then use that passion to create amazing morph mixes that you enjoy. It's MUCH easier to sell a snake you think is the most amazing thing in the world, than trying to offer a "low quality pastel" for a bargin of a price . . .

But yes, the first 1-3 years is all about investing, after the 3rd year, you should be able to start breaking even and if you're lucky with the odds of genetics, start seeing a positive return on investment.

Also this. There is good insight here, buying quality to start will really decrease the time it takes to make your money back. An extreme example to illustrate this would be if you bought a male banana and 2 female normals breeding size. 26k intitial investment. 25k 1.0 banana, 0.2 $300 normals, 700 on husbandry(not a a bad allowance for a 3 snake setup especially if you're a DIYer). Let's say you do a little worse than average and hit 2 banana's per clutch, you have come up roughly 60-80k in snake value depending on market and snake value.

Of course this is just off the top of my head, my number may not be spot on but you should get the picture.

The other extreme would be buying normals or low end morphs such as pastels, yellowbellies, etc. and producing those as a 1.2 trio to start with. or even morphs that may be worth a bit more lets say <500. Realistically by the time you've produced babies that you can sell and not hold back for future projects all of these morphs have depreciated to at least the 300 dollar mark or lower.

That was my mentality going into it and I started with lower end morphs because it was what I could realistically afford being in college and living on my own. I bought the ones I liked the most AND that would also be project worthy and I have no regrets.