Rehoming Mollies: Sharing with hobbyists
TL:DR - It’s OK to rehome balloon mollies and ask for adoption fees. But to repeatedly sell frequently with stated prices, without the license to sell, AVS may investigate your transactions.
If you keep balloon mollies, you already know the “problem”: Balloon Mollies breed. A lot!
Livebearers don’t need much encouragement — a healthy, well-fed pair of balloon mollies will multiply into dozens within a few months.
Sooner or later, many of us ends up with more mollies than we can care for.
The natural solution for us is simply to rehome them. That’s been a normal, well-meaning part of how this hobby works here in Singapore.
But it’s time for Balloonmollies.com to be upfront, and to ask fellow hobbyists to be mindful of our Singapore’s AVS regulations.
“Rehoming animals on valid grounds are allowed (relocating, financial or health issues etc) and seeking ‘reasonable’ adoption fees are acceptable to cover certain costs incurred (vet fees, grooming, medication etc).
Investigation is therefore conducted (by AVS), where possible, to ascertain certain ‘adoptions’ and/or rehoming practices and take appropriate enforcement action.”
In short: it’s OK for you to ask for a reasonable adoption fees when you rehome mollies.
But if you literally sell them, without AVS license, the agency may investigate.
What Changes in our telegram groups
Starting now (13 August 2026), we’re asking fellow hobbyists to be mindful when you post about rehoming fishes:
Words to avoid:
- “Sell,” “selling,” “for sale”
- “Price,” “$X each,” “buy now”
- Anything that likes a business (such as posting with your channel name that has a branding)
Words to use instead:
- “Rehoming” / “looking for a good home for…”
- “Adoption fee” (not “price”)
- (optionally) your reason for rehoming, where relevant — reduce bioload, tank space, moving, cutting down colony size, etc.
- Keep any adoption fee tied to actual costs: food, water conditioner, medication, bags, boxes, transport — not a per-fish profit margin
A Bonus: Rehoming Helps Fix the Price Problem Too
There’s another reason why rehoming makes sense right now.
Written earlier, balloon molly prices in Singapore have been hyped up, overpriced.
Mollies are simply too easy and too fast to breed for their prices to stay inflated, hyped up.
Every batch of mollies that gets rehomed instead of being sold overpriced is one more sign to the market that these fish are abundant, not rare — and one less transaction propping up unrealistic prices.
If the local supply of balloon mollies is genuinely as large as it looks (between overseas farms overproducing and local hobbyists breeding successfully), then normalising rehoming is just the community catching up to that reality a little faster.
It’s good for the hobby: Fewer fish being sold commercially, more fish finding good homes at a fair adoption fee. This helps to keep balloon molly prices reasonable.