I managed to pay for my entire hobby costs from breeding rare plecos. This is a lot different than breeding more common and way less expensive fish. I started with the common BN tank strains but they are a money loser in terms of making a profit. While breeding less pricey fish may be both interesting and fun, if ones goal it to come out ahead, it is a lot easier to sell one $500 fish than to sell a hundred $5 fish.
I fell in love with the B&W Hypancistrus early on. I could not wait to get my first zebra plecos. Then I just wanted to have a few to have them and i managed to get a couple finally. And then I was presented with a really nice opportunity. I was offered a proven breeding group of 13 fish and a number of fry from them. Once i decided I had to get them, I had to break into my IRA to pay the $3,500 they cost.
Then I got lucky. Just over two weeks after the went into my tank the alpha make spawned, Two weeks later the #2 male spawned. Under normal circumstances the male is willing to spawn monthly. That is the time from the actual spawn to when the dad kick the free swimming fry out of the cave if they have not left on their own. So the two fish continued to spawn such that I was getting new fry about every two weeks. They did go on a hiatus every 10 months or so and then resumed after about a 3+ month break. In the first year I had over 100 fry.
When they got big enough for me to feel safe shipping them I started to sell babies in Feb. of the next year. I developed a waiting list for the fry. Most people do not buy more than a couple of BN, maybe 5 if I was lucky. I sold the zebras with a 5 fish minimum order and a max of 10 to any one buyer. I wanted to spread them around. They important fact was that one box of 5 zebras grossed me more money than one year of selling BN.
The zebras paid me back for what they cost, They they paid me back for every dollar I had spent on my entire fish keeping hobby to day. Then they provided me with the capital to buy my next group of plecos. Utimately, I ended up with a number of Hupancistrus species I had breeding. The last two groups of fish I acquired cost me an average of $1,000 for one species and $800 for another. The money for this came from what I was breeding, So I started to make spending money.
I was able to sell my fish without being on any social media and without having my own site for doing so. Because the fish I was working with were both rare and not so easy to find, people managed to find me. I did have a thread on what i was doing on one site and I joined at Planetcatfish and had threads there about what I was breeding. I also sold in the vendor room at the annual NEC weekend event and also at the bi-annual Catfish Convention just outside of Washington DC. My final event was the 2023 Keystone clash in PA. I have been downsizig since about 2022 and now have only one breeding group remaining.
The point of what I am telling you is that oif you are looking for extra income, then inexpensive fish are not the way to go. These need to be produced in huge numbers and selling them is much more work and has a pretty low margin on the hobby scale as opposed to being a fish farm.
I am not suggesting that you need to work with the plecos I chose to breed and sell. I have a thing for the B&W Hypans, so they are what I chose. What I am suggesting is you should find species you really like and which are more expensive and work with them. While it may be fun working with species that are inexpensive relatively speaking, but is is very difficult to make that profitable.
Yes, I spent many $1,000s to acquire the fish I worked with over time, but they are the ones that can make a profit without working me to the point of it making more sense to take a part time job at McDonalds or Burger King to make spending money than to breed and sell large numbers of more lower value species. If you want to do that it makes more sense to buy them for resale than to breed them.
One last observation here. I set up my very first tank, a community, at the end of Jan 2001. I spent the next few years learning to care for fish and what it took to breed them. I did not get the breeding group of zebras until over 5 years after that. But once I had them for a while it was the start of a great adventure which was worth it on many levels, especially making a profit. I was able to do what i did from my home. Unlike many folks this house has no basement and no room where i could have a centralized system.
My tanks have been spread out across two buildings and up to 5 room in the summer. I have pumps and long hoses to enable me to do this. But the fish I worked with were smaller in size and I had 20L, 33L and 40B tanks. it took me about 10-12 years to put a 75 gal and a 125 gal into use for breeding and growing out. This was more work but not so much that it turned me off to the process.
Consider all of this in deciding what species you decide you will try to work with as it is much easier to make money selling fewer fish but at a much higher price/fish. I was a stroke of luck that I was offered that first breeding group of zebras as i 2006 finding such group was nearly impossible. I hope this info is helpful in how you decide to proceed.
