What's great about having insects/arachnids for pets? Well for one, no poop!

I would say having a house full of insect/arachnid pets is a lot less work than having a dog, about the same as having a cat, and probably less than having an aquarium full of fancy fish.  The big advantage of insects/arachnids, as the title says, is there is rarely a need to clean up poop.  You would have quite a challenging time even finding poop to clean up.  Because most of my critters live in containers lined with some kind of substrate, mostly coconut choir mixed with peat moss and vermiculite, the poop simply composts on site and disappears. The work is in maintaining humidity and in finding food for them all. I say finding food, rather than feeding them, because feeding them is quite entertaining, and doesn't feel like work.  But finding the food can be quite challenging.  Tiny 1/4 spiderlings require fruit flies or at most, week old crickets.  My Avicularia spiderling prefers maggots.  My larger tarantulas eat larger crickets.  The rule of thumb is the length of the cricket should not exceed the length of the spiders abdomen:

Jennifer's Abdomen

My Mantids really like moths, that I collect from around my back porch light.  I am nervous about feeding wild-caught insects because they may have been tainted with pesticides, but so far it hasn't caused a problem. Fruit flies are not always that easy to get, but once you have them it is easy and inexpensive to maintain a culture. I periodically contemplate raising my own crickets, but quickly dismiss the idea.  Crickets are smelly and once they get to sexual maturity, loud. But sometimes you go to the store to get some, and they just don't have any, or the ones they have are all too big.  Or sometimes, they are all dead. Fortunately, unlike a cat or a dog that really doesn't tolerate being without food for long, most of my critters can go several weeks without food without any harm.  The exception would be the mantids that seem to need to eat regularly, and the ant colonies which need an input of calories pretty much all the time (with the exception of queens that don't have workers yet, they can live for over a year without eating - I know this because I have queens that haven't eaten in that long). The ants can be left with supplies for quite awhile though, as long as it things like honey and seeds that won't go moldy.

My critters take up a chunk of most of my evenings, after my son has gone to bed.  Some nights I am just too tired and other than making sure the mantids have a misting of water (they don't really go in for water dishes), I don't pay any attention to any of them.  Try doing that with a dog!