A small Appalachian-based company building husbandry software — and keeping the animals it's written for.
Appalachian Tarantulas, LLC is a Tennessee company based in Mountain City, in the Appalachian mountains. We build two husbandry tracking apps — Tarantuverse for invertebrates and Herpetoverse for reptiles and amphibians — both free to start, on the web and on iOS and Android.
Behind them sits a structured species care database that we research and maintain ourselves. It's the part of this that takes the most time, and it's the reason the apps can tell you something useful about a particular animal rather than just storing your notes.
We also keep and breed these animals. That isn't a side business so much as the input — writing feeding intervals and enclosure specs for species you've never kept is how bad husbandry advice gets made. Captive-bred stock will be offered here once we're confident in it.
Most husbandry information online is inherited rather than sourced. A number gets posted to a forum, quoted in a care sheet, repeated in a video, and ten years later nobody can say where it came from or whether it was ever right. Meanwhile the keeper with the animal in front of them is trying to work out whether it's in premolt or in trouble.
We think the useful thing software can do here is be specific and be honest about its limits. Our apps tell you when a recommendation comes from a species care sheet and when it's a general default. When we don't have data, they say so rather than filling the gap with a confident guess.
We're early and we say so. We don't publish user counts we haven't earned, we don't claim experience we don't have, and we don't show a number in the apps that we can't point at a source for. In a hobby where bad information kills animals, that's not a marketing position — it's the product requirement.
Both apps export everything you've recorded — animals, logs, photos, breeding records — in open formats, whenever you want, on the free tier. A collection history built over years shouldn't be hostage to a subscription.
Most of what ships comes from keepers telling us something is wrong or missing. It's a small enough community that we can actually answer, and a small enough team that we can act on it quickly.
Browse the care database, or tell us what you're working on.