Your account and your plan

An account is free. A garden you own is paid for, and its first month is free. Everyone you invite into a garden is free.

While the soft launch is running, nothing is charged at all — no garden is ever made read-only during it, whenever you started one. The pricing page carries the date it runs until, and we will tell you well before anything changes. The rest of this page describes what happens afterwards.

See pricing for current prices and allowances.

#What’s free, and stays free

Having an account. Signing up costs nothing and always will. You can follow public gardens, comment, react, and browse the plant catalog, the supplies catalog and every published technique without ever paying.

Being in someone else’s garden. If you are invited into a garden, you are free — at any role, including manager, doing everything that role can do. The owner pays for the garden; nobody pays per person. A community garden with thirty volunteers pays for one garden, exactly like a gardener with one raised bed.

Inviting people into your own. However many of them, at any role. Invite people to learn from your garden or help tend it.

Public gardens, Explore, following and the feed. All of it.

A trial of the assistant. See below.

#What a garden costs you, and what it buys

Each garden you own has its own subscription. It includes:

Your record in it, without limits. Areas, plants, sowings, activities, harvests, and notes. There is no limit on the number of these records.

The whole watering side. Schedules, runs and exceptions.

Photo storage. A much larger allowance.

The assistant. Chat, the plant doctor, harvest photo scanning, and a briefing that refreshes daily rather than weekly. Its allowance belongs to the garden and is shared by everyone in it, which is why nobody you invite needs a subscription of their own. See the garden assistant for what each of those does.

A new garden’s first month is free, with no card asked for, and nothing is charged when it ends. You can subscribe monthly or annually. Without a subscription, the garden becomes read-only when its trial ends.

#If you were here before gardens were paid for

Gardens that already existed when this changed are free for as long as you keep them. There is nothing to subscribe to, nothing expires, and no reminder is coming. Their settings page says so.

The free garden and photo storage have separate rules. A grandfathered garden is treated as paid for where the garden is what matters — it gets the shared assistant allowance and the faster briefing — but photo space is still counted per account, so its owner stays on the free storage allowance unless they pay for a garden somewhere. Subscribing one would raise the photo allowance.

#The free trial of the AI features

Every account — including free ones — gets a one-time allowance of the assistant, the plant doctor and harvest scanning, so you can try them with your garden.

It does not expire. Sign up in November, ignore the assistant until March, and the whole allowance is still sitting there.

#If you stop paying

Ending a subscription does not delete your records. The garden becomes read-only: every plant, harvest, photo and note stays exactly where it is, you can still open it, the people you shared it with can still read it, it stays public if it was public, and owners and managers can download its records and photos. See the export section below.

What stops is adding and editing. You cannot log a harvest, add a plant or change a bed in a frozen garden, and the assistant will not record anything in it either, though you can still ask it questions. Moderating comments on it still works, making it public or private still works, and subscribing again turns writing back on exactly where you left off.

Background updates also pause. Automated watering runs stop being recorded while a garden is frozen — your timer keeps running, the app stops recording runs, and missing runs are not added later. And the garden briefing stops refreshing, since it is advice about what to do next.

If you cancel, adding and editing remain available until your paid period ends.

The same thing happens when a new garden’s free month runs out and you have not subscribed. You are not charged automatically, and your existing records remain readable.

#Taking your record with you

Every garden can be exported, by its owner or a manager, from the garden’s settings page under Export your garden. You get a zip holding a spreadsheet for each kind of record — your plants, your harvests, your activities, your beds, your seed trays, your shed, your watering setup, your prices and who had access — plus every photo in the garden.

It is built in the background and we email you a link when it is ready. The link is good for a few days, and you can ask for another whenever you like. This is free and always will be, and it keeps working on a garden you have stopped paying for.

#Where to change things

• Subscriptions in your account menu — every garden you own and where each one stands. Starting and cancelling happen on the garden’s own settings page, since the answer can differ from one garden to the next.
• Storage — what your photos are using, broken down by what they are attached to, with the ability to delete individual ones.
• Notification settings — what you get emailed about, whether you get the weekly digest, whether the newsletter reaches you, and whether seed-starting reminders do. It is also where a phone or computer is turned on for notifications, which using it on your phone walks through.
• Profile — your display name, which is what shows on public gardens. It is deliberately separate from the name on your billing.

#Telling us something

Feedback in the footer is how you reach the people who build this — say what broke, what you wish existed, or anything else. The page you were on is recorded alongside it, so you do not have to describe where you were, and you can attach a screenshot.

We read every one, and we can write back. A reply arrives as an email to the address on your account, quoting what you sent so you can tell which message it answers, and replying to that email reaches us again. We cannot promise an individual reply to every message.

#The newsletter

The occasional newsletter includes growing ideas, ways to learn from your garden, and news about Grow Food Together. The weekly garden digest is a separate email about your own garden.

If you have an account, it is a switch in Notification settings. New accounts choose at signup; accounts that existed before the box did are on the list until they turn it off. Turning all email off turns this off with it.

Anyone without an account can join from the newsletter page, which also lists every past issue. Joining takes one confirmation click, and every issue carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in.

Check your email after signing up. New subscribers receive a confirmation link; existing account holders receive instructions for their notification settings. If you are already subscribed, the email confirms that. If no email arrives, check the address you entered and your spam folder.

If you asked for access while sign-ups were by invitation and ticked the box on that form, approving your request puts you on the list without a confirmation step — the invite already went to that address — and the choice follows you into the account you create with it.

Every issue is also a post on the blog, so nothing lives only in your inbox.

#A note on names

Your account has a display name and a billing name. The display name is what other people see — on a public garden, on an activity you logged, in a garden’s member list. Your billing name is not shown to anyone.

That name is also a way in. In most places it appears — on a comment, on an activity or a harvest in a feed, in a garden’s member list — it links to that person’s profile, which lists the public gardens they garden in and the techniques they have published. Only public gardens appear there, on your own profile as much as on anyone else’s; your private ones stay where you reach them, in your account. Profiles are for people with an account, so a visitor reading a public garden without signing in sees names as plain text.