If you are breeding rats for feeders I would recommend getting all white rats so you don't get attached to one color or another. Otherwise you'll save all the pretty ones, they will have pretty babies and you will stop feeding them off LOL. That's how I started, then made the hard decision to feed off all of them except the white ones. Now it's much easier.
You can actually save quite a bit of money breeding rats. If you breed in aquariums it soils the food quickly, they waste a lot, there a lot of time cleaning, etc. But if you go to a rack system you can feed them once a week in bins above and the food never spoils and never gets wasted. You can save more money on feed if you switch to dog food but I prefer a professional rodent diet. The bedding is the next expense, if you can find shredded paper it's free and cuts your costs in half.
Right now I have 50 bins of rats and mice, takes me about 2 hours to clean them all. I prefer to clean twice a week, so that's 4 hours of cleaning per week. It's not too bad if you consider the time it would take to thaw and feed frozen rodents for all my snakes. I actually prefer to feed live now, I can feed almost 50 snakes in about 20 minutes. I'm sure it would take much longer feeding frozen and you would get a lot more snakes that don't eat. There are a few I do fresh kill for with CO2 (jumbo rats for my retics and adult mice for my King snake).
I would recommend breeding your own rats on a small scale to try it out. You have to have the nerve to feed live or to gas them with CO2, probably the biggest hurdle for most people. I have plenty of local snake breeders and pet stores that can take all of my excess, in fact there's a local pet store that buys 300 rats per week and he runs out by Tuesday and is out the rest of the week. He needs more but the supply isn't there, so I never worry about getting too many.
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