Most of the worry in keeping a hamster comes down to a handful of questions. How long will it live, and is mine getting old? Is this cage actually big enough, or just the one the shop sold me? Can it have a grape? What do I call it? These free tools answer one of those questions each, from your own hamster and your own numbers, in a few seconds. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to install, and they work on a phone held in one hand while the other is holding a very small, very wriggly animal.
Hamster Calculators
Numbers in, an answer out: how long your hamster lives, how old it really is, what it all costs.
Checkers & Finders
One thing in your hand — a food, a cage, a breed — and a straight answer about it, with who says so.
Planners & Names
Plans to follow day by day, and names worth saying out loud.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure here is quoted from whoever published it, with the date I last checked it printed next to the answer: the Merck Veterinary Manual, the vets who write for PetMD and VCA, the UK’s animal charities — the RSPCA, the PDSA and Blue Cross — and, for cage sizes, the two countries that have actually written a hamster’s space into law. Nothing is invented, and nothing is dressed up to look more precise than it is.
Where the official answers disagree, you see both
This surprised me when I started checking. Swiss and Austrian law set a minimum cage floor of about 1,800 square centimetres; the PDSA and Blue Cross ask for 5,000. The Merck manual says a Roborovski lives three to four years; PetMD says two to three. One charity lists onion as a safe vegetable and the vets I trust say keep it away. Most pages quietly pick one and print it as fact. These tools print both, say who said which, and — where it is about food — take the safer answer.
Where a tool stops
I keep hamsters; I am not a vet. None of these tools diagnoses a sick hamster, none of them will tell you a dose of anything, and none of them will tell you whether a cold, still hamster is alive. If yours is not eating, has a wet bottom, is breathing oddly, or has been cold and will not wake, ring a vet who sees small animals rather than working from a web page — including this one. The tools are for the everyday questions: age, space, food, names.
Share an answer, or keep it
Every result has its own link. Copy link saves exactly what you entered, so you can send the cage check to whoever is buying the cage, or keep your hamster’s name ideas on your phone for the drive home from the rescue.
Put a tool on your own site
Every tool has an Embed button. It gives you a short piece of code to paste into a page, a rescue’s adoption page, a club newsletter or a forum. The tool works there exactly as it does here, free, with a credit line linking back.
More from the site
The tools answer the quick questions. For the longer ones — why a hamster bites, what to do on the first day, whether two Syrians can ever share, and a few dozen answers to “can hamsters eat…?” — start with the latest posts.