No trial clock, no card, no feature that quietly stops working in week two. Identification, watering that follows your weather, the plant library and the marketplace are all on the free tier permanently. Paying gets you more room and conversations with Herb — not the basics back.
Paid plans aren’t switched on yet — nobody has been charged anything. The prices below are what they’ll be when they are.
Each cell is one plant. That’s the actual cap the app enforces — nothing here is a soft number that turns out to mean something else once you’re inside.
Free for good
Enough for a windowsill and a balcony, without ever paying.
10 plants
$4.99 a month
For when the collection outgrows one room and you want to ask questions.
30 plants
$9.99 a month
For a serious collection, and the only tier with soil readings.
100 plants
Quotas reset at midnight UTC. Hit one and the app tells you so — it doesn’t quietly get worse at its job for the rest of the day.
A free plan that stops being useful after a fortnight isn’t free, it’s a countdown. These stay on, whether or not you ever pay us anything.
What you don’t get free is conversation with Herb. Chat is the expensive part to run, so it’s the part we charge for — and we’d rather say that than dress it up.
Chat is metered per day rather than per month, so a heavy Sunday can’t empty the tank for the rest of the month. Everything resets at midnight UTC.
Reach the limit and the app says so, in words, immediately. It does not start answering worse and hoping you don’t notice — that’s the version of metering we refuse to ship.
Photographing a plant to identify it, or a sick leaf to diagnose it, is the cheapest thing we do — so the free allowance is set where a real collection will never hit it. Most people use a handful in a week.
A scan is only counted once it has actually run. If the request fails, your allowance is untouched — and if we can’t identify the plant confidently, you get told that rather than a guess dressed up as an answer.
Soil intelligence reads a photograph of the pot surface and reports three things about what’s under it. It’s the single feature reserved for Botanist, and we’d rather have one real one than a list of five that mean nothing.
Every sample carries a confidence figure and a plain recommendation — and when the photo isn’t good enough to tell, that’s what it says.
Most of what makes a paid app unpleasant arrives later, once the growth targets arrive. These are the ones we’ve decided against in advance.
There is no ad slot anywhere in the app, on any tier, and we're not building one. A plant app that sells your attention has stopped working for you.
Your garden, your photographs and your conversations with Herb aren't a product. They don't get sold, and they don't get handed to anyone for training.
Stop paying and your plants stay. The cap limits what you can ADD, not what you already have — nothing gets deleted for going back to free.
Reaching a quota produces a clear message, not a cheaper model answering as if nothing happened. You'll always know which you're getting.
Plain answers, including the ones that aren’t flattering.
Yes, permanently — not a trial. The free Hobbyist plan holds ten plants, gives you thirty AI scans a day, and includes identification, weather-aware watering, the whole plant library, your Home map, the community and the marketplace. No card, no countdown.
Room and conversation. Gardener ($4.99 a month) raises you to thirty plants, fifty scans a day, fifty messages a day with Herb, and lets you run more than one Home. Botanist ($9.99) goes to a hundred plants, a hundred and fifty scans, two hundred messages, and adds soil intelligence.
Because it's the expensive part to run. A scan costs us a fraction of a penny, so we can be generous with it; a conversation is a different order of cost. Charging for the expensive thing and giving away the cheap one is the honest way round.
The app tells you, in plain words, and the allowance resets at midnight UTC. It does not quietly switch to a worse model and carry on — you'll always know which you're getting.
No. The plant limit governs what you can add, not what you already have. Plants over the free cap are kept — you simply can't add new ones until you're back under it.
Not yet. There's a free tier and two monthly ones, and that's all we're offering until people are actually using them and can tell us what's missing.
Not with a trial, no — we'd rather the free tier be genuinely good than dangle the paid one for a fortnight. Everything except Herb chat and soil intelligence is on the free plan, so you can judge the app properly before deciding.
Not yet. Paid plans aren't switched on and nobody has been charged anything. Get the app now on the free tier — it's complete on its own, and the prices above are what the paid plans will cost when they open.
Ten plants, thirty scans a day, the whole library and a garden that already knows your weather. If you outgrow it, the paid plans will be there — and if you don’t, that’s a perfectly good outcome too.