Accounts, data, privacy and the bits nobody advertises
Every feature page here answers its own questions, so this one deliberately doesn’t repeat them. What’s left is the awkward middle: who can see your garden, what happens when you delete your account, and which parts we haven’t finished.
Ask, and somebody actually answers.
Most questions belong to a page, so we send you there
Repeating an answer on two pages helps nobody — it just makes both of them worse at being found. Each of these is answered properly where it belongs.
What LeafRanger actually is
An app for keeping houseplants alive. You photograph a plant to identify it, or a bad leaf to work out what’s wrong; it goes into a model of your home — rooms, spots and how much light each one gets — and its watering shifts with the real weather where you live. Every answer comes from a catalogue of 381,000 species that is graded by how well each one is actually known, rather than from a language model’s memory. When we hold no data, the app says so and goes and researches it, and only tells you it doesn’t know when that genuinely fails. There is a community of people who grow things, and a marketplace of independent shops whose listings attach to the same catalogue records.
It is free for ten plants, permanently, and it is not released yet.
Four things we hold, and that’s the list
You need an account — a garden has to be remembered across years and phones, and there’s no honest anonymous version of that. Here is everything it holds.
Your garden
The plants you own, the rooms you keep them in, and what you've watered when. That's the bulk of it, and it's what the app is for.
Photographs you take
Scans and diagnosis photos, kept against the plant so you can see whether it actually improved.
Your conversations with Herb
So he can refer back to what you told him. Not used to train anything, and not sold.
Roughly where you are
Enough to fetch your weather, because that's what moves the watering schedule. It is never attached to a post unless you switch that on.
Three settings, and two things we haven’t finished
Who can see your garden
Not everyone. You can open it up or shut it entirely, and it's one switch rather than a per-plant chore.
Who can message you
Narrow it to people you follow back, or turn messages off completely.
Location on your posts
Your rough location is used to fetch weather. Attaching it to a post is a separate, deliberate choice.
It arrives somewhere staffed.
Reports go to a queue, not a void
Three different things can be wrong, and they take different routes — but none of them is a contact form that goes nowhere.
A wrong plant record
The most valuable thing you can tell us. A bad care field doesn't affect only you — it reaches everyone who owns that species.
A post, comment or person
Reported from the item itself. It lands in a moderation queue with a real status: open, reviewed, actioned or dismissed.
A shop that isn't delivering
Goes to us, not into a void. Repeated failures are what the warning and suspension ladder exists for.
Anywhere there’s weather
Somebody, somewhere, is watering right now.
No region lock
There's no country list to be excluded from. The app doesn't care where you are, only what the weather is doing there.
Weather, not a hemisphere setting
Watering shifts on your actual local forecast, so a February in Melbourne and a February in Manchester behave completely differently — without you configuring anything.
English, for now
That's the honest state of it. We'd rather say so than list a dozen languages we haven't actually translated.
The cross-cutting ones
- Do I need an account to use it?
- Yes. Your plants, rooms and watering history are tied to an account so they survive a new phone — there's no useful anonymous mode for something that has to remember your garden for years.
- Who else can see my garden?
- By default, only people who follow you. You can change it to everyone or to nobody at all, and it's a single setting rather than something buried per-plant. Separately, location is never attached to a post unless you explicitly turn that on.
- Can I stop people messaging me?
- Yes — messages can be open to everyone, restricted to people you follow back, or switched off entirely. It's the same three-way choice as garden visibility, in the same place.
- What happens if I delete my account?
- Your account is closed and your session is revoked immediately, so nothing of yours is reachable any more. Being straight about the limits: today that's a closure rather than a full erase of every row, and a proper deletion pipeline is on the list of things that must exist before we'd call this released.
- Can I get my data out?
- Not properly yet. There's a button that registers the request, but the export itself isn't built — it produces no file today, and we'd rather tell you that than let you find out when you need it. It's listed on the About page as unfinished for exactly this reason.
- Which parts stop working when I'm offline?
- Anything that has to reach us: identifying a photo, diagnosing a leaf, a weather update, and talking to Herb. Reading the garden you already have works from the device. Watering reminders are the interesting exception — they're scheduled on your phone and fire regardless, which the care reminders page explains properly.
- Which countries and languages is it for?
- Anywhere. Watering adapts to the weather wherever you are rather than to a region setting, and the marketplace is worldwide with each shop stating where it ships. The app itself is in English at the moment, and we're not going to list languages we haven't translated.
- How do I report a wrong plant record, or a problem?
- Report it from the record or the post itself and it reaches a moderation queue rather than a void. Wrong care data is worth telling us about — an incorrect record propagates to everyone holding that plant, which is precisely why we want to hear about it.
Still nothing here that answers it?
Then it’s a question worth us answering properly. The app isn’t released yet, so the fastest way to hear anything is the waitlist — and if you’d rather ask a person, the contact details go up with the legal pages.