About Shells N Scales

Shells N Scales is a care tracking app for tortoise and reptile keepers. It keeps the record of an animal's life in one place: weight and shell-length growth logs with charts, vivarium maintenance schedules, bulb replacement dates with UV (UVI) readings, feeding regimes and supplement rotations, breeding attempts with egg and incubation data, and notes for health issues or behaviour changes. Costs and sales can be logged against each enclosure too, so a keeper can see what an animal actually costs to look after.

Alongside the tracking tools there is an education side: species care sheets covering housing, heating, lighting and diet, a lighting and Ferguson Zone reference, a genetics guide with a calculator, a live food nutrition section, and winter hibernation and brumation guides. A weekly quiz lets keepers test their husbandry knowledge and compete on a leaderboard.

It is built for anyone who keeps reptiles and wants their records to be reliable rather than scattered across notebooks and phone notes. That includes hobbyists with a single tortoise, families looking after a child's first lizard, rescue and rehoming volunteers, and breeders running multiple adults, clutches and incubation batches.

Breeders also get a public marketplace for listing animals for sale, with reservation and deposit tracking, buyer details and sales records — useful for keeping the paperwork straight during a busy hatching season.

Shells N Scales is built and maintained independently by a small team of reptile keepers, not a large company. Every feature starts as something we needed for our own animals, and suggestions sent through the in-app feature request box shape what gets built next.

Care content is researched from published husbandry sources and shared in good faith, but it is guidance rather than veterinary advice — always check advice against several sources and a reptile-experienced vet before making decisions about an animal's health.