How much does it cost you to house a snake?

[cchardwick]

I've spent about $3,000+ on my ARS rack system that holds 20 large snakes, half of it will hold adult ball pythons, the other half will hold adult Woma pythons. I actually decided not to fill it with Woma pythons, I just have one in there and just bought a dwarf reticulated python that will outgrow it in about a year or so. Once my retic gets big it will need a Vision 600, those are about $600 for that one cage and that one snake. Once the retic gets bigger it will probably eat jumbo rats or medium rabbits every week, that's going to be a big expense. You didn't ask the cost of the snakes, my most expensive ball python was $1,500.

I probably have about $10,000 total invested in my ARS rack and 18 snakes. Should pay off in the long run once I start cranking out baby snakes, should actually make way more money than I spend and hopefully will pay not only for that rack but a few more. I'd like to get a hatchling rack, a grow out rack, then a rat breeding rack and maybe a rat grow out rack, all from ARS. So that's probably another $12,000 in equipment I'm looking at in the next few years. I should be able to make that with the babies from the first few years. But all my snakes are babies and it will take me about 2-3 years before I get my first babies, so I may be all set up and break even in about five years if I'm lucky LOL. I may get another retic male to breed my female, probably once my female gets really tame and a year or two on her as far as growth.

I like the ARS racks, they are top of the line and they hold their value. I see a lot of people get really cheap racks up front, then fill their whole room with cheap racks only to find years down the road that they want to replace them all with higher quality rack systems. You can almost sell a used ARS rack for the same price as a new rack. For most people it's a money making investment and you can easily get most of your money back if you decide to sell the racks after you use them for years. I like to go pro right from the start, that way ten or fifteen years down the road you end up with a really nice setup instead of a bunch of stuff that needs to be replaced.

So I guess right now I have about $500 per snake invested on average.

I also didn't include my rat, mouse, and ASF breeding operation. Probably have about $1,000 invested in that as well. Although since I breed my own rodents and use feed from the feed store, most of which costs less than $10 per 50 pounds, I'm coming out way ahead on the price of feeders.