Saving Money in the Reptile Hobby
Reptile keeping is an expensive hobby, especially if you want to do it properly! Having said that there are ways to save money without compromising on care.
I am often asked "how can you afford to run The Reptile Room?" The main answer is that we allow our communal beasties to breed as they would in the wild and then sell the excess offspring.
Our Trio of Klemmeri geckos live together communally with their offspring and produce four babies every month, now they do actively raise their young but if we didn't sell some of the offspring we would run the risk of inbreeding and overcrowding. I allow the babies to stay with their parents for the first 4-6 months before they have to be separated for their own well being.
Mourning geckos reproduce via parthenogenesis meaning you can't physically stop them from cloning themselves; one on her own will breed with herself no matter what you do! To prevent our vivarium from becoming overrun I place toothbrush cases around for them to lay eggs in then I can easily remove the tube as soon as I notice eggs and move it to a nursery jar for the babies to hatch out safely. Without the tubes Mourning geckos tend to lay their eggs in the lid vents - which makes removing them impossible! The eggs are super fragile and any attempt to move them could easily result in the egg smashing but If you leave the eggs in the vivarium you run the risk of loosing the babies - they will either go missing or get trapped in the doors when you open the vivarium to feed your pets.
With the tubes we get at least six babies a month from our Mourning geckos.
A lot of Dart frogs can only be kept in pairs - either two females, two males or a mated pair, or kept as trios - meaning two females and a male. As darts don't reach sexual maturity until around eight months chances are they will start breeding before you know it! The vast majority of dart frogs do not actively raise their own young and bugger off as soon as the eggs are fertilized which means you can ethically remove them from the vivarium without causing any upset to your frogs. Eggs left inside a vivarium very rarely survive.
The main draw back for a lot of people is that tadpoles can take anywhere up to twenty weeks to morph out into frogs, and then should not be sold for at least another two months to ensure that they are healthy and eating well. You will not get rich quick breeding dart frogs! BUT you could trade your tadpoles or froglets for those of another species and expand your collection that way.
Isopods are a great place to start as five easy care pods can turn into one hundred in just a couple of months. With the income you get from them you can save up for what we call "posh pods" you know the Duckies, Pandas, Bees and the amazing spiky ones. Oh there is so much variety to choose from.
The income you get from breeding beasties that require very little to no interference from you could keep your lights on all year round!
Now aside from breeding, here are some tips and tricks that I have learnt along the way.
Vivariums
I never buy new enclosures, always second hand. As long as the glass is intact with no cracks or chips, and the lid is intact and free of rust. A wash down with reptile disinfectant and polished up with glass cleaner on the outside they can be made good as new.
We have saved hundreds of not thousands of euros by buying second hand - or better yet - gotten for free! Our entire tortoise garden was built from 250 recycled roof tiles we collected for free! Keep an eye out for freebies always!
Heating and lighting
One of the most important things we do to save money is keeping The Reptile Room at a steady 22.C, we do this by keeping the doors closed, side windows covered with insulating screens and keeping the curtains closed at night. In the cooler months we have an oil heater in the middle of the room set on a thermostat - heating the room instead of the individual vivariums is a game changer!
Lighting is also vital - instead of trying to save money by going for cheaper light bulbs that crap out after a few months and don't produce nearly enough output needed to keep plants and reptiles alive and well. We use long Arcadia shade dwellers and Jungle dawn lights that can cover multiple tanks at once - using two lights instead of six. I also love that they can be connected together so you can run ten lights from one plug socket which means you only need one timer for all of those lights instead of ten!
Supplements and powdered food
Most geckos require a complete diet made up of both live insects dusted with calcium and a complete powdered food - commonly referred to as CGD (crested gecko diet). There are many different brands to choose from, here in The Reptile Room we use Pangea Growth and Breeding. It's expensive but if you buy in bulk you will save money in the long run. Pangea, like all powdered foods last twice as long if you keep them refrigerated - so many people don't do this and end up having to throw it out and buy more when its gone off after just a couple of months when it can last for six months in the fridge! Supplements are the same- store your calcium and vitamins in the fridge!
Another way to minimize waste is to mix CGD in a cup, use a pipette to dish out the exact amount that you need per bowl and put the cup in the fridge for your next feeding - pre-mixed CGD is good for a week in the fridge!
Grow your own
Veggies
When our first rescue tortoise arrived in January 2026 we knew we had to do something to make keeping him more sustainable and so I started Timmys Garden - in it we grow cabbage, lettuce, bok choy, chard and of course dandelions (as he loves them!) as well as basil, coriander and parsley on our windowsills.
I currently use three leaves of bok choy, two cabbage leaves, a handful of basil, three lettuce leaves and a handful of dandelions from here every day.
Obviously we still have to add bugs and fruit to the beardies and tortoises diet but it lessens the financial burden when we can grow as much as we can onsite.
It also helps that our garden is surrounded by brambles which are a great free food source for our stick insects.
Plants
Another way we save money here is planting and propagating our own plants. Some take longer than others to grow out but we have a fairly stable supply of Pothos, Peace Lilly, Succulents, Bromiliads, Ferns, Snake plants and Begonias. Something suitable for all set ups.
Turning one plant into ten plants is an easy way to save money. Some you can grow from cuttings (like Pothos), some from fallen leaves (succulents), some grow from leaves cut in half (Snake plants), and some double and triple themselves from the root (like Begonia and Peace Lilly).
I'm a plant person - in fact The Reptile Room wouldn't exist today if it weren't for the garden centers closing at the beginning of Covid. I love plants, and when the world was locked down I dove deep into my love of all things green and leafy! What started with wondering what plants can live in an aquarium, quickly led to what plants can live in a pauladarium, terrarium, vivarium, then desert set ups. There really is a plant for every occasion - who knew? And I grow them all here in The Reptile Room.
Breed your own feeders!
Locusts
Our rescue bearded dragons Drogon, Viserion and Wink have quite the appetites so we started a locust farm about a week after they arrived to keep up with their need for live food.
We have been using a wooden vivarium originally purchased to house Hershel, the Horsefiled tortoise we took in. It's been vacant since he was rehomed and still had a UVB set up inside so it made sense to reuse it. Locusts need UVB to help the molt and grow into extra large feeders, they also need branches to climb and hang from whilst molting - luckily our apple trees needed pruning.
They eat fresh veggies (see above) and rabbit food to maintain healthy growth. Locusts have a habit of drowning themselves so you cant give them a water bowl, a lot of breeders give them orange slices to keep them hydrated BUT as these are destined to feed our bearded dragons we do not use oranges as beardies can not tolerate citric acid,
so we use melon and cucumber as a water source for our locusts.
For the next generation of locusts we provide a moist nest box off to the left hand side away from the light for the extra extra large locusts to lay their eggs in.
I'm currently taking four extra large locusts from this viv every two to three days.
Mario worms
We have been trying to breed Mario worms for a few months now, I've managed to get my adults to pupa and beetle stage but then getting the beetles to lay eggs and getting those eggs to hatch has been a stumbling block for me. Meal worms are much easier to breed but they are so prone to mites that it's just not worth it (for me anyway).
I'm not overly concerned about this colony as Mario worms are considered a treat and not a staple food source. I'd still like to get them breeding for me though.
Isopods
The main and some may say the most important part of a bioactive vivarium is the Isopods AKA the waste collectors! I love Isopods, what started with finding a cheap clean up crew very quickly turned into ooohhhh look at those.... there are so many different varieties! I Keep Powder Blues, Oranges and Dairy Cows as our basic clean up Isos, but we also keep Yellow and White Zebras, Red Panda King, Magic Potions, Red Calicos, and Rubber Duckies as pets. Isopods are so easy to keep - all you need a tub of organic soil, some leaf litter and cork bark. They eat poop, leaves, fruit, veggies and fish food. The difference in price comes from the difficulty to breed - Powders breed effortlessly whereas Duckys can take 6-8 months to produce offspring!
I take 50-100 Isos from my colonies every couple of weeks to top up my vivs.
Earth worms
We took two axolotls into our care a couple of months ago which resulted in our little worm farm crashing. We built it back in 2023 to feed Antonio, not for him plus two friends! So we have had to build a new one, a much larger and more efficient one!
We started with a 300L plastic bin, drilled holes in the lid and the base. filled with organic compost, tipped the contents of the old worm farm inside. We feed the worms on the left hand side of the bin and harvest worm castings from the right. Worm castings are a fantastic fertilizer for plants!!! All food not eaten by Timmy, the locusts, the roaches or beardies are emptied into the worm farm every morning.
I'm currently taking 4 full size worms from this bin every two days to feed the lottls.
Flightless Fruit Flies
We have six dart frog vivariums and two colonies of dwarf geckos - they eat a lot of flies - four cultures worth of fruit flies every week. Rather than paying 30+ euro each week on fruit flies I make my own cultures.
A large tub of nekton fly media is 20 euro on Amazon and will make at least 32 fly cultures. A large bag of wood wool is 10 euro and will last for a full year. Use the old deli cups from old cultures you have purchased, wash them out with washing up liquid and boiling water, or put them through the dishwasher. You're good to go. I make four cultures a week, cultures take 3-4 weeks to "boom". As long as you make your cultures on the same day every week and make sure you keep on top of your media supply then you will have an infinite supply.
Roaches
We have two roach farms in The Reptile Room, a Lobster roach bin and a Dubia roach viv.
We've had our lobster roach colony for four years at least - we use them to feed our Cresties, Mantids, Tarantula and Chahoua gecko. Lobster roaches are smaller than Dubias so are better for small to medium feeders - BUT they can climb glass and plastic! Its the only thing I hate about this colony of feeders is that they are always trying to escape and if they do I'm f**ked! They do quite well in Irish homes so I have to be extra careful about who I feed them to! The Main colony has a Vaseline rim around it to prevent escapes but if I dumped a bunch in say Krinkles viv then they 100% would escape into my house.....Which is why I tong feed these guys!
Having said that lobster roaches are insanely easy to breed so if you are looking for a free live food source for small and medium sized beasties I'd 100% recommend them! All you need is a dark bin with a Vaseline rim, throw in some vermiculite to control the smell and some egg cartons for them to hide in. Feed them left over veggies once a week. Done.
I started a Dubia roach farm last month to take some pressure off our locusts. Again its a super easy set up - I'm using an old aquarium that will no longer hold water but it will hold roaches! Vermiculite substrate, egg cartons on one side, fruit and veggies on the other. If one of our fish or crabs pass away I toss it in here for them. Dubias eat everything! They do like it dark so I've thrown a blanket over their viv.
I currently take 4 sub adults from this colony every other day.
Finders keepers
Leaf litter and branches
As all of our enclosures are bioactive we go through a lot of leaf litter, luckily for us we have Oak, Hazel, Magnolia and Chestnut trees in our garden. I harvest leaves every two months, dry them in a hanging net in the garage. By harvesting all year round I never have to buy any in winter, spring or summer when most suppliers put their prices up!
I grow bamboo for our dwarf geckos to climb on and lay their eggs inside, we also have a large apple tree which needs regular pruning - so free branches for our vivariums.
Waste not want not
Lastly, don't waste a thing!
If you upgrade a heater, filter, light canopy, thermostat - DO NOT SELL THE OLD ONE! If it's not broken don't waste it. I know it can be tempting to try to make a bit of cash by selling off things you're not using but seriously the amount of times I've had to fall back on old equipment in an emergency - I'm so glad I learnt that lesson fast!
Emergencies happen; bulbs blow, aquariums explode, filters fail and the very last thing you want to do first thing in the morning is drive to the nearest (and probably most expensive) reptile store to have to buy a replacement because you cant wait a week for delivery. Use your old equipment until the cheaper replacement arrives. Trust me you will save in the long run.
Aside from equipment there are ways to save money literally just by feeding your feeder/scavenger beasties -
Isopods love to eat wasted crested gecko food, they will also clean up your dead locusts, crickets and roaches from your feeder bins.
Earth worms eat leftover salads from tortoises and bearded dragons.
Vampire crabs and Dubia roaches will eat your pet fish that pass away, mantises who have died of old age and even baby geckos who didn't make it!
Don't waste the free food!
So there you have it. Go forth and spread the word - Reptile Keeping doesn't have to break the bank if you put the effort in!
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