Manage every habitat. Track every creature.

A unified platform for the world of keepers and breeders

For decades, the people who care for reptiles, spiders, aquatics, birds, small mammals, and equines have lived between worlds. The hobbyist with a rack of ball pythons, the breeder running a spider room, the equine professional tracking foal lineage, and the weekend vendor at a regional reptile expo all face the same problem: their records live in notebooks, spreadsheets, shoebox photo folders, Facebook DMs, and a half-dozen apps that were never designed for the way they actually work. HabZoo, developed and operated under ABSG Tech's project-management portfolio, exists to collapse that mess into a single, mobile-first record system that keepers can use every day and breeders can grow into.

HabZoo's product frame is deliberately broad. The platform is built around four core public surfaces — HabZoo Keeper, HabZoo Breeder, HabZoo Market, and Show Mode — that share a common data model: Habs (enclosures, terrariums, cups, tubs, tanks, kennels, stalls, paddocks), Residents (individual animals or grouped cohorts living in a hab), Broods (clutches, litters, spiderling groups), Lineage (sire, dam, offspring, transfer history), Care Logs (feeding, journals, reminders), and Marketplace (seller profiles, public inventory, future offspring, shows, reservations). One record can move all the way from "private pet" through "public seller listing" to "sold and transferred to the buyer's account" without ever being duplicated.

The community problem HabZoo solves

The reptile and exotic-animal community is famously fragmented. Vendors travel hundreds of miles to monthly regional shows. Lineage records are often handwritten on cup labels. A spider breeder might have 400 slings in deli cups across a single rack, each at a different molt stage, with no scalable way to record instar history or split groups when individuals are sold. A reptile vendor preparing for the Michigan Reptile Show in Taylor or NARBC Dallas may rebuild their entire inventory list from scratch the night before the event.

That same community is also genuinely passionate about provenance. Buyers want to know who hatched an animal, when, from which pair, with what husbandry history. Sellers want their good work to follow the animal even after sale. HabZoo's foundation makes this explicit: "the pet history survives the handoff." When a sold animal transfers from seller to buyer, the new owner inherits photos, journals, care logs, baseline husbandry, and lineage — locked but readable. That's a structural answer to a community-wide problem that no general-purpose pet app addresses.

What's actually shipped today

Core keeper tools

• Track pets, livestock, reptiles, birds, fish, inverts, and mixed collections in one place
• Save feeding, cleaning, journal, record, achievement, molt, and habitat notes per pet
• Manage public and private pet photos, close-ups, and habitat shots
• Use the HabZoo Assistant — an AI layer that turns natural-language keeper updates into structured care records

Sharing and family access

• Public pet-share pages for active animals
• Memorial pages with guestbook memories after a pet is memorialized
• Family-plan seats (up to five) with shared pet visibility and per-pet take-with-me vs. stay-with-family controls when a member leaves
• Pet transfer between HabZoo members or by invite email, with locked inherited history on both sides

Breeding, lineage, and records

• Breeding-state tracking (paired, gravid, nesting, hatched/whelped/foaled)
• Lineage graph supporting dam, sire, offspring, paired_with, hatched_from, split_to_individual, split_to_group, transferred_to
• Group/cohort records that decrement during sales and split into individuals while preserving source history
• Document buckets for pedigree papers, DNA sexing, microchip records, vet records, transfer paperwork, and award certificates

Marketplace and seller tools

• Pro sellers turn an available pet into a public marketplace listing with pricing, shipping, and payment-link methods
• Pro sellers run a public goods store with seller-owned categories, multi-step item editor, and inventory modes
• Listings can be $1 boosted for 30 days via Stripe Checkout
• Each seller store item gets its own canonical public URL (/seller/:handle/:itemSlug) with Open Graph, Twitter cards, and JSON-LD Product/Offer metadata for SEO
• Anonymous visitors can build a seller-scoped cart before logging in, then convert to a HabZoo buy-offer thread after verifying their account

Shows, exhibits, and live kiosk

• Public exhibits-and-shows directory with show pages, comments, photos, and claim requests
• Pro sellers attach attendance to a discovered show, build a table inventory from their existing pet records, and launch a private kiosk URL at the event
• Item-specific printable QR labels (2x1) that link to public pet or store-item pages
• Live kiosk pages refresh from server-sent events instead of relying on manual refresh
• Group/cohort records decrement one unit at a time during live show selling

The reptile-show calendar — a flagship discovery layer

This is where HabZoo's vertical insight is sharpest. The platform doesn't just let a vendor build a kiosk; it brings them the calendar. HabZoo ships curated show datasets covering national reptile shows across 8+ states for 2026, plus dense regional coverage of monthly events in Michigan, Ohio, and the Tri-State at venues like Taylor Town Trade Center, Kalamazoo County Expo Center, American 1 Event Center, Franklin County Fairgrounds, Metroplex Expo Center, and Holiday Inn West Chester. Each record includes venue, dates, times, admission tiers, and vendor-relevant notes ("Florida law prohibits iguanas and tegus at the show," "VIP passes include early entry both days and vendor set-up access").

The architecture separates this discovery layer cleanly into a canonical show layer (show_series, show_occurrences, show_sources, show_claim_requests, show_admins), a seller attendance layer (seller_show_entries, items, presence windows, payment profiles), and a buyer transfer layer (transfer intents, tokens, transfers, onboarding invites). The discovery pipeline already covers HERPS, Reptile Super Show, Michigan Reptile Show, Repticon, Show Me Reptile Show, ReptileExpo.com, and NARBC.

For a hobbyist, this means: "Pick your home region and travel regions, and HabZoo will tell you what's coming up near you." For a vendor: "Click any discovered show and one-tap convert it into a live HabZoo table inventory built from your existing pet records." For an organizer: "Claim your show's official HabZoo page and become its admin." That is genuinely new infrastructure for this community.

Animal-profile packs — broader than reptiles

HabZoo is "habitats + zoo," not "lizards only." Six profile packs layer on a universal core: Arachnid (instar, molt dates, sling groups, prey-size guidance), Reptile/Amphibian (hatch date, shed history, clutch tracking, supplement and UVB notes), Aquatics (tank assignment, group spawn records, water-parameter reminders), Bird (aviary assignment, clutch dates, band numbers, DNA sexing), Companion Breeder (litter tracking, shot reminders, microchip references, contracts), and Equine (stall/pasture assignment, turnout schedule, farrier reminders, sire/dam/foal lineage, registration paperwork).

The housing model spans cup, rack_tub, habitat, tank, aviary, kennel, stall, pasture, bin, and other. A spider in a deli cup and a horse in a paddock use the same data model. This is unusual and, for a community accustomed to single-species apps, very practical.

Tech stack and ABSG's operational posture

• Frontend: Server-rendered HTML + bundled app.js/style.css shipped as a PWA, with a service worker and asset-version cache-busting. Built mobile-first for kiosk tablet usage.
• Backend: Node.js (Express-style server.js + routes/ + db.js schema bootstrap on startup).
• Database: PostgreSQL 16 (Alpine), persistent on host storage, scheduled compressed logical backups with 14-day daily + 8-week weekly retention.
• Cache & realtime: Redis for shared rate limiting, cross-node coordination, websocket presence, live read receipts, and cross-node WebRTC signaling fanout.
• Edge: Nginx fronts two redundant habzoo_web_1 and habzoo_web_2 containers; nginx retries the other node if one fails. A dedicated habzoo_jobs container runs cleanup and reminder jobs. PostgreSQL-backed sessions mean members never log out when traffic shifts between web nodes.
• Realtime: Server-Sent Events for live show kiosks; websockets at /ws/realtime for member chat presence and read receipts; optional WebRTC for member calls.
• Payments: Stripe Checkout + Customer Portal + webhooks for HabZoo-owned billing (Plus $12/yr, Plus Family $25/yr, Pro $45/yr); seller payouts go through linked Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Stripe Payment Links, Square Checkout, or custom URLs.
• Email: HostGator IMAP inbound sync for [email protected], Amazon SES outbound, an admin Email workspace with Inbox/Tickets/Templates/Settings, member-facing Help & Support with readable ticket IDs like HZ-00001.
• Auth: Password + email-code + Google + Facebook with account linking.
• AI: A natural-language assistant that turns keeper updates into structured care records.

Who it's for

• Hobbyist keepers who want a tidy record of feedings, sheds, photos, and journal notes for the animals they love.
• Professional breeders who need lineage graphs, batch-and-cohort workflows, reservation pipelines, and continuity of pedigree records across sales.
• Show vendors who travel a monthly circuit and need a kiosk-ready table inventory, printable QR labels, and live sold/hold updates without rebuilding their list from scratch each weekend.
• Show organizers who eventually want to claim their canonical HabZoo show page and administer their event.
• Buyers and adopters who want to inherit real animal history with the pet they take home — not start from zero.

Where it's heading

The roadmap is explicit. Next steps include richer Stripe Connect-style seller billing, sales-tax service integration, category landing pages by species and seller region, buyer order history with shipment tracking, bulk label printing for heavy show prep, recurring show-series auto-generation, browser-assisted importers for Cloudflare-gated organizer sites, optional live member-to-member WebRTC calls, and lifecycle-triggered subscription emails. The longer arc moves HabZoo from "tracker + marketplace + show kiosk" into a true vertical platform for the keeper economy — record continuity, marketplace trust, search-driven discovery, and event infrastructure, all built on one universal pet record.