Ball pythons and reptiles in general are hands down one of the best ways to make money if you want to breed any animal. There is quite a bit of overhead to keep these reptiles going, I have about 50 snakes and 50 tubs of rats, right now it costs me about $4,000 a year for bedding and food for my rats and bedding for the snakes. You can reduce your costs if you use cheap or free bedding and low cost rat food. The hard part would be to buy in too fast without selling any animals for the first few years, the cost of feeding and upkeep can make you go broke before you even get babies. Something to keep in mind...

As with any animal breeding project it's all about breeding stock. Say for example you get an average of 6 eggs per year. If you buy $15 breeder snakes you'll get $15 x 6 = $90 per year for the babies, you may not break even. But if you bought $400 parents and the babies were worth $400 you would make $400 x 6 = $2,400 per year. It's the same if you had $10,000 snakes and made $60,000 for the hatchlings. The more you spend up front the more you make, assuming the supply and demand doesn't drive the prices down (which it will to some extent, more for certain high demand morphs). It's the same with any animal, I buy grass hay for my cattle and travel to a lot of different farms to get it. People breeding donkeys don't make much money, but you wouldn't believe what the ranches look like for people breeding million dollar race horses! It all depends on your budget too, maybe start small with as much as you have and trade them out down the road for something better.

Personally I think it's better to buy one female for as much as you can afford and keep high end snakes with as few as possible to start. Sure you can fill your rack with hets but in a few years you will be producing tons of hets instead of visuals (or tons of cheap snakes instead of a few high end snakes). Holding back more valuable snakes down the road will make you more money in the long run with a lot less work and overhead.

As far as moving the normal and single gene hatchlings you can always find a wholesaler that will take as many as you can produce. These guys sell to pet stores nation wide and just turn a profit on everything you produce and always will take as much as you can give them. Some people even prefer to wholesale the whole lot of hatchlings and don't even bother with selling to other people, you don't get as much money but you can get rid of all your snakes fast with no hassle at all.