Dart frog price tags

[Leefrogs]

ya, and wild caught painted mantellas (flown from madagascar) are 30$ captive born ones are twice that

[VicSkimmr]

Wild caught frogs will always be cheaper than the captive bred equivalent. There is significantly less work (read: cost) involved with providing a wild caught frog.

Let's take R. benedicta for example. Yes they cost a lot of money, as they were just recently brought legally into the hobby, and just recently begun being captive bred. Eventually supply will increase, driving down the cost to a reasonable level. In the mean time, should Mark Pepper eat the costs of all the time and expense he's had to put in to bring them into the hobby just so that every newbie frog keeper can have some? If not Mark, should the first adopters who paid his prices to get them eat all of their extra expense associated with purchasing them?

Is it even right to undercut Mark and all the hard work he put in? Prices on some morphs have decreased dramatically already. This is a lot like the car community and wheels. A company, lets say Volk, designs a great wheel in the TE-37. They spend loads of money in R&D to bring it to the public. Then another company, Rota, simply copies the design and offers it for 25% of the cost of buying the Volk. Is that right?

The fact is that this is an expensive hobby, there's no way around it. If you can't afford to buy what's "hot" right now, wait a few years until they drop in price. Breeders charge a price that buyers are willing to pay, that's just how it works. If the buyers decided it wasn't worth the cost, the market value would drop. If you'd like to help drive the cost down, feel free to go out and purchase expensive frogs and then sell them for pennies on the dollar. Nobody is stopping you.