A good friend does it, but she does not charge to do it so the financial aspects haven't been studied. She puts other's eggs in with her on since she has a large Brinsea. Firstly, the contract would have to be fairly verbose regarding "not responsible" stuff. Nobody can vouch for the state of the eggs going in, so fertility rate and hatchability are out of the question...but if that's so, then why have you hatch them at all? Assuming they can't buy day-olds (or older), there's the only reason (or somehow you are going to price yourself cheaper). The only way I could see it being profitable is if you had multiple bators and could sustain rolling hatches. So you have X bators running pre-lockdown, and enough to handle how many lockdowns you might need. My concern would be introducing new eggs to an existing hatch...how do you know what's on those new eggs? If you were sterile enough you could wash all new eggs (I've talked with people who dip their eggs in a chlorine solution before putting them in the bator, and they seem to think it works). The other concern is how to convince someone whose eggs have failed that you should still get paid. OTOH, I recently found out that queen bees need to be hatched, so offering a hatching service could extend to such things, or exotic birds, turtles, snakes, and a variety of egg laying species.
I didn't realize we were running 2 days apart. I guess the Brinsea/Frankenbator challenge is on!
