Advice for purchasing a BP?

[rufretic]

The reality of normal pricing is $15/$25 at shows, locally on CL it will come down to supply and demand in your area and how long someone is willing to care and feed a normal.

10

Sad but true. I didn’t want to be the one to shatter his hopes and dreams lol. But honestly, if you can get $50, you should. I know I sure would be happy too

[Godzilla78]

Sad but true. I didn’t want to be the one to shatter his hopes and dreams lol. But honestly, if you can get $50, you should. I know I sure would be happy too

I guess there is a high demand / low supply around here.
$25 would be very low. $60-$80 at a pet store.


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[Godzilla78]

I don’t plan on breeding normals any way, as there are plenty of breeders in the USA


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[cchardwick]

Most people don't plan on breeding normals, it's usually a side product of the pairing. The more genes in the mix the lower the odds, but if you breed a couple single gene co-dominant morphs together you'll still get 25% normals. For example, this is the result of crossing a pastel with a pinstripe:

Percent	Fraction	Genes
25 %	1/4	Normal (Wild Type, Classic)
25 %	1/4	Pastel (Pastel Jungle)
25 %	1/4	Pinstripe (pin)
25 %	1/4	Lemon Blast

I have quite a few double or single gene females and single gene males so will get quite a few normals this year. I have a local pet store that will buy as many normals as I can give him for $15 each, he marks them up and sells them for $50, and I think our local Petco sells them for $80. At the shows the cheapest price is typically $20. Craig's List is a good place to get cheap or free snakes, I have a nice big beautiful normal female that I got for free on CL, she is breeding this year for the first time. I'm actually breeding her with a scaleless head male, hoping to get a scaleless head female to raise up so I can eventually get a scaleless ball python.

Personally for your first snake I'd wait for a local reptile show like Repticon. You should be able to get a variety of choices from multiple breeders and pick up something nice.

[larryd23]

if $70 is pricey than think again prior to buy a snake proper equipment will be more expensive (starting with a reliable thermostat because burns are even more expensive)
Etc

I purchased a pastel banana BP for my daughter this past summer. We are fortunate enough to have a reptile specialty store near us, so finding equipment, supplies, livestock and advice was pretty easy. They do their own breeding and do consignment sales for local breeders.

Our local store will give you a normal BP for free if you buy the set up from them. We paid more than I want my wife to know for our pastel banana boi, but not nearly as much as we did for his habitat. We also made a few costly mistakes along the way. We purchased an Exo Terra glass cage which we will soon be replacing with an AP T10. We also purchased a cheap thermostat that we soon replaced with a Herpstat (so we could could have worry free sleep).

My point is that before you start worrying about purchasing your snake, you should start pricing your habitat. We had ours set up and stable for several weeks before we brought home our BP.