startup with NO 'assists' or 'magic potions.'

[Sk8r]

.....is cheap, simple, and just as fast, IME. Let me walk you through why you're paying money and not saving any time.

1. to set up with no assists, have 'cured' rock and one nice live rock; or all live rock; or cured rock and even a gallon of somebody's water. Set up first rock, then sand, then water (and do yourself a favor: start with ro/di, to avoid the very thing you bought 'cured' rock to avoid; hair algae in sheets and waves.)

2. feed your tank 4-5 flakes of fish food daily. That's it. No shrimp, no potions, no mystery stuff, no purple stuff.

3. get nitrate/ammonia test strips; get a test for alkalinity; get a refractometer (not a swing-arm salinity test) and a log book. Get an ATO (autotopoff) connected to a ro/di tank. This will be a good time not to let the ATO foul up---and there can be a learning curve.

4. start testing daily. Write down your results. WIth date.

5. if you've set up that ATO correctly the refractometer will show NO changes.

6. every day, test, then write down results, then feed the fish food.

7. When it shows ammonia, do (6.)
8. If ammonia goes away, congrats, but continue (6) for several more days. If STILL no ammonia, you are cycled.
9. buy a couple of cerith snails and a couple of micro hermits. Test their water to see if it's the same salinity. If not, adjust it, and do all adjustment within 20 minutes. Wash them off in discard salt water and put them in. Repeat 6.
10. If they're still alive after 5 days, add more ceriths and hermits. Buy a fish. Quarantine it in a bare tank for 4 weeks before putting it in.
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What does that 4 weeks do? It gives your ceriths and crabs time to poo gentle algae/fishfood poo into that sandbed, which is getting complex, stronger, and able to handle a fish's more carnivorous poo; and!!!!!!! bacteria are colonizing the teeny-tiny pores of that rock, all the way to the center, which TAKES TIME!!!!! They have to divide and multiply, and set up housekeeping,and all that.
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This is why the potions don't save you any real time. They encourage you to dump it in and yeehah! you're going to be cycled. Piffle. Bacteria STILL have to work their way through uncolonized rock, and it still takes time. Sure, you can dump fish right in there with bacteria occupying only the thinnest possible skin on that rock---and if anything goes in the least wrong, you're going to have problems. You're not fully set up, you haven't been testing, you haven't been correcting, you haven't had an ATO going, and you're in trouble with a very, very fragile ecosystem that can't take much at all going wrong. Your poor (too often multiple) fish end up with an alkalinity in the 6's and a slime coat that's in a mess as a result, and things just are fragile.

Indeed there are successes with the magic-potion method. It actually does better, I suspect, in fresh water than in marine. But it does NOT substitute for getting that rock and sand bed prepared, through time and colonization, all the way to real maturity of that rock and bed. So you're paying for 'time-saved' ---but rock still takes the same amount of time, and it's not that resilient if the usual things that go wrong with beginner tanks go wrong.

If you really, really want to save the money for fishfood, you can even skip that step and just go with the natural die-off of stressed live rock, but honestly, the fishfood actually seems to help. And you can still dump in magic potion in if you must. But at very least---give the tank that extra four weeks with the crabs and snails before you plop a fish in there. And give that fish four weeks in quarantine so he has a reasonable chance for health. A brand new hotel room with a wonky toilet feeding into the drinking water isn't what you'd want to move into, so give him a chance for 4 weeks of clean water and a toilet that's functioning well. And an ATO and a maintenance record backing it all up.