How to price a lovebird chick
without guessing
Most breeders price from memory, and memory is generous to the buyer. Here is the method I use, the mutation floor table you can build from your own records, and the three mistakes that cost me most.
- Your own sale history is a better price guide than any market rate you can be quoted
- A mutation floor is one number per mutation, calculated once a season
- In one aviary, 16 chicks were priced below floor, and the shortfall was large enough to matter
- Splits and documentation both move price, and both are usually given away free
The problem with pricing from memory
Ask a breeder what a chick is worth and you will usually get a number that came from the last time someone asked. That number tends to be old, tends to be the price of a bird that was easy to sell, and tends to drift downward, because the sales you remember most clearly are the ones you argued about.
When I audited my own aviary in September 2026, I found 16 chicks priced below what comparable birds of the same mutation had actually sold for in the previous two seasons. The shortfall was substantial. Nothing had gone wrong. I had simply been pricing from recall instead of from records.
You are not trying to guess the market. You are trying to remember your own market accurately. Every bird you have ever sold is a data point, and together they are more reliable than any figure someone quotes you in a Facebook group.
Step one: build your mutation floor table
A mutation floor is the average price a mutation has actually achieved in your aviary. One number per mutation, recalculated once a season. It is not a target and not a ceiling. It is the line below which you do not go without a specific reason.
To calculate it, take every sale of that mutation in the last 24 months, remove gifts and internal transfers, then divide total revenue by the number of birds sold. That is it.
What the table looks like
The shape matters more than anyone else's numbers. Four columns, one row per mutation. Fill it from your own sales, because a floor built from someone else's aviary is not a floor, it is a guess.
| Mutation | Birds sold | Total revenue | Price floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mutation A | 7 | your total | total ÷ 7 |
| Mutation B | 10 | your total | total ÷ 10 |
| Mutation C | 13 | your total | total ÷ 13 |
| Mutation D | 32 | your total | total ÷ 32 |
| Mutation E | 26 | your total | total ÷ 26 |
Deliberately unpriced. We do not publish our own floors, and neither should you: a published price is a number every buyer negotiates down from and every competitor prices against. Run the method on your records and keep the output private.
When I filled mine in, two things jumped out. My best mutations were worth roughly twenty times a plain Blue. And the mutation that felt like my strongest seller, because I had sold the most of it, earned less per bird than one I had sold far fewer of. Volume had disguised a weak per-bird price.
Do not build this table by hand
KinBird works out a floor for each mutation from your own sales, shows it next to every unsold bird's asking price, and lifts the low ones in two taps.
Step two: adjust for what
the buyer is actually buying
The floor is the starting point, not the answer. Four things reliably move a price up or down from it.
Splits are worth money and are usually given away
A bird that is split for a recessive mutation carries breeding value you cannot see. The buyer is purchasing future offspring, not appearance. In my records a documented split sold for roughly 20 to 40 percent above the visible-only equivalent. Undocumented splits sold for nothing extra, because the buyer had no reason to believe the claim.
If you want to understand which splits are even possible in a given pairing, the lovebird genetics calculator will show you, free, without an account.
Documentation removes the discount
A serious buyer asks who the parents were. If you cannot answer, they mentally discount the bird, because they are absorbing the risk that your description is wrong. A printed pedigree with ring numbers does not add a premium so much as it removes a discount you were already paying without noticing.
Sex matters more than most breeders price for
In a market where hens are the constraint on how fast anyone can expand, a proven or DNA-sexed hen of a scarce mutation carries a premium over a cock of the same mutation. If you sell chicks before DNA results come back, you are selling that premium away.
Age cuts both ways
An unsold chick at nine months costs more to keep than one at three months, and buyers read a long-unsold bird as a bird something is wrong with. Track the age of your unsold stock and price to move it before that impression forms.
I once sold a documented Aqua split for the price of a visible Aqua, because I had not recorded the split and could not prove it at the point of sale. The buyer bred three Aqua chicks from it the following season. The information existed. It was in my head instead of on paper.
Step three: check every bird
against the floor, every season
Building the table once is not the exercise. The exercise is running your current unsold stock against it and finding the gaps. When I did this, the pattern was consistent: the birds priced lowest relative to their floor were the ones I had priced first, early in the season, before I had a feel for how the market was moving.
- List every unsold bird with its mutation and current asking price
- Put the mutation floor next to each one
- Calculate the gap as a percentage, not a taka amount, so small and large birds compare fairly
- Reprice anything more than 15 percent under floor unless you have a specific reason not to
Percentages matter here. A gap worth a fifth of a modest bird is serious mispricing. The same taka amount against your most expensive bird is a rounding error. Ranking by taka amount will send you to the wrong birds first.
What this is not
This method tells you what your birds have been worth to your buyers. It does not tell you what they are worth in another city, to a different buyer, or next season. It is a floor built from your own history, and history is a guide, not a guarantee.
It also assumes your records are honest. If gifts, part-payments and internal transfers are mixed into your sales figures, the average is wrong in a way that will quietly push your floor down. Exclude them before you calculate, every time.
Common questions
What is a fair price for a lovebird chick?
There is no single fair price. A chick is worth what comparable birds of the same mutation sold for in your own market within the last two seasons. Run the method on your own records. Somebody else's average is not your price.
How do I work out a mutation price floor?
Take every sale of that mutation in the last 24 months, remove gifts and internal transfers, then divide total revenue by the number of birds sold. That average is your floor. Recalculate it once a season, not once ever.
Should I price a chick differently if it is split for a mutation?
Yes. A split carries breeding value the visible bird does not show. A documented split sells for roughly 20 to 40 percent above the visible-only equivalent, because the buyer is purchasing future offspring. An undocumented split sells for nothing extra, because there is no reason to believe it.
Does a pedigree certificate actually change the price?
It changes what a serious buyer will pay, because it removes doubt about lineage. Undocumented birds get discounted by buyers who cannot verify the parents, particularly for splits and recessives where the claim cannot be seen on the bird.
How often should I redo this?
Once at the start of each breeding season, and again if you have an unusually large batch of sales in one mutation. More often than that and you are reacting to noise rather than to the market.