We build a garden planner that actually understands gardens.
Most gardening apps treat your patio, raised bed, and grandma's 50-year-old plot as the same thing. They're not. GardenPlan is the small, opinionated app we wished existed when we first tried to plan a real garden.
Why we built it
The two of us tried to plan a 4×8 raised bed in spring 2025 and spent three evenings wrestling with spreadsheets, conflicting online charts, and apps that wanted us to buy seeds before they'd let us see a plan. The actual product we wanted — “here's my space, here's my zone, what should I plant and when?” — didn't exist as a small, focused app. So we built it.
How GardenPlan works
GardenPlan is offline-first and signup-free. You can install it, sketch a bed, and pick plants in under a minute without giving us an email. The Pro features (AI plant identification, full plant library, hyperlocal weather alerts, smart reminders) unlock with a subscription that includes a 3-day free trial.
Plant identification runs through OpenAI's API with zero-retention defaults — your photos are processed transiently and never used to train a model. Weather comes from Open-Meteo. The plant database, watering math, and companion-planting ruleset are all our own.
How we make money
One way: Pro subscriptions, via the App Store and Google Play. That's it. We don't sell your data, we don't run ads, and we don't have a B2B side that profits off your gardens. The Pro tier funds the database, the AI bill, and the rare developer who actually gardens.
Pricing is straightforward and shown on our Terms of Service. Weekly $5.99, Annual $29.99 (with the 3-day trial), or Lifetime $79.99.
Why the blog isn't translated
The five language editions of our blog are not translations of one article. They're separate pieces, researched from the Reddit threads, regional forums, and Google search patterns of each country. A summer-survival guide for an Arab balcony gardener in Riyadh has almost nothing in common with a square-foot spacing guide for a US zone-6 grower — and shouldn't be the same article.
We picked five languages — English, French, Arabic, German, Spanish — because they cover the markets we use the app in ourselves, and where gardening culture is rich enough to justify country-specific writing. More languages may come later. None will be machine-translated dumps of an existing article.
What we won't add
- An ad network. Ever.
- A social feed. There are enough already.
- A “share your garden with the community” feature that quietly turns your photos into training data.
- A “premium” tier above Pro to nag people into upgrading again.
How to reach us
Email support@gardenplan.cc — we read everything and reply within one business day. The support page has the most common questions plus quick links to App Store / Google Play refund tools and a data-deletion form.
For bug reports, please include your device model, OS version, and the GardenPlan version (Settings → About). A screenshot or recording is gold.
Editorial standards
Every article on the blog is researched against primary sources — Reddit threads we link to, regional gardening forums, and agricultural extension services (RHS in the UK, INRAE in France, NABU and BUND in Germany, university extension in the US). When we recommend a variety, a watering schedule, or a biological control, we name the source. When we say “don't do this,” we explain what happens if you do.
We don't publish AI-generated content as articles, and we don't translate articles between languages — each language is its own piece, written for that audience's climate and culture.