About Aquabuildr
Nobody starts this hobby planning to lose fish.
We did anyway — repeatedly, expensively, and always for reasons that were obvious a week too late. Aquabuildr is the app we needed back then: the all-in-one aquarium app that knows what is in your tank, checks every decision against it, and catches trouble while it is still cheap to fix.
Our story
It started with a question at the Shedd Aquarium.
In 2017, one of our founders stood in front of a small display tank at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and wondered: how do they know which fish can live together in there?
The answer turned out to be scattered everywhere and gathered nowhere. Months of local store visits, videos, books, charts and forum threads later, it was clear the problem was not a lack of knowledge in this hobby — it was that a new aquarist had no reliable way to get to it. That gap was costing people fish, and it was pushing people out of the hobby before they ever got good at it. It still is.
So we started building. We bootstrapped Aquabuildr through the Covid pandemic, and when our original development partner closed its doors, we lost nearly all our momentum. Instead of stopping, we built our own in-house engineering team in 2022. In 2023 we joined forces with Kevin and KaveMan Aquatics, adding one of the most trusted voices in the hobby — and a marketing powerhouse — to the team.
Since then, Aquabuildr has grown faster than we ever planned. The mission has not changed: help more people succeed with their first tank, keep them in the hobby, and bring the hobby's turnover rate below 10%.
Who we are
Aquabuildr builds intelligent aquarium software, and we keep tanks ourselves. The knowledge in this hobby is real, but it is scattered — across forums, videos, printed charts, and the one person behind the store counter who actually knows. We did all of it. Then we built the app that skips it.
We are not neutral about this. A tank is a closed ecosystem holding live animals, and most of what kills them is decided before anything is bought: the wrong fish, the wrong volume, the wrong filter, the three weeks nobody waited. That is the part software can genuinely fix — so that is the part we work on.
What we do
Four jobs.
Everything in the app belongs to one of them — and each one is a promise we are on the hook for.
Build it right
Know what belongs in the tank before you pay for it.
Stay ahead of trouble
Spot problems while they're still small and cheap to fix.
Know, don't guess
Real answers from real data — not the loudest forum reply.
See your progress
Watch a tank — and a single fish — get visibly better.
How we build
Six rules we don't break.
The score has a floor
A tank health score stops at 40, never zero. Skipping maintenance should read as a problem to fix, not a verdict on you — guilt has never once fixed a nitrite spike.
Vetted beats computed
Compatibility comes from researched tank-mate lists, intersected across everything already swimming — not from two temperature ranges overlapping and hoping for the best.
Real world, not laboratory
Filters are rated under ideal conditions, so we derate them — canisters to 65%, sponges to 60% — and size for the tank you actually keep, including what lives in it.
Beginners can't be rushed
The step-by-step guide won't let you skip ahead. Cycling takes weeks and no app can shorten it, so we chart it, explain it, and tell you when the tank is actually ready.
Twenty-one languages, not one
The hobby isn't English-only, so the app isn't either. Every screen, the beginner guide and the fish data are translated — because welfare advice is worthless in a language you don't read.
We only print what we can prove
Every figure on this site traces back to something running in the product. Where we can't verify a number, we leave it off the page rather than round it up.
Who we build with
Built with KaveMan Aquatics
Kevin Matos — KaveMan Aquatics on YouTube, and Aquabuildr's CMO — helps shape what goes into the app, from the stocking rules to the filtration engine. When something in here sounds like it came from someone who has actually lost a tank, it did.
Free to download. Premium from $4.99/mo.
Plan the tank, check every fish, and stay ahead of trouble with a score that tells you what to do next.
