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Open Plants and choose Add plant. Give it a name, start typing a species to pick one from the suggestions, and optionally add a photo and a space (“kitchen window”).

Picking a species from the suggestion list is the step that matters. It is what wires up the care guide, the pet-toxicity note, and a suggested care schedule. A species you type freehand saves perfectly well, but it stays just a label.

When you add a plant with Add suggested care tasks ticked and a recognised species, we set up a routine for you:

• If the species matches one of our curated care bundles (tropical houseplant, succulent or cactus, and so on), you get that whole bundle — typically watering, fertilising and pruning on sensible intervals.
• If it doesn’t match a bundle but our species data has a watering cadence, you get a single watering task on that cadence.
• If the species is freehand text, or the species data has no watering cadence, you get nothing automatically.

You can always add tasks by hand from the plant’s page — nothing here is required.

Care guides come from an external species database, and they only appear for plants saved with a species we recognised — that is, one you picked from the autocomplete rather than typed freehand.

To fix it, edit the plant and re-pick the species from the suggestion list. If the species genuinely isn’t in the database, there is no guide to show, and we won’t invent one.

Inside the app, press ⌘K on a Mac or Ctrl+K elsewhere. It searches your plants (by name, species and location) and your tasks (by plant name, task type and notes), showing up to eight of each. Press Enter on a result to jump to it.

JPEG, PNG or WebP, up to 5 MB — and the app shrinks large photos in your browser before uploading, so most phone photos are fine as they come. If an upload is interrupted, the plant is still saved and no broken image is attached; retry from the plant’s page.

The cap counts active plants only. Plants you have archived, or marked as died or given away, do not count against it — so archiving a plant you are no longer caring for frees a slot immediately, and keeps all of its history.

The caps are 20 plants on the free Seedling plan, 200 on Garden and 5,000 on Greenhouse. Nothing is ever deleted for being over a cap; you just can’t add more until you are back under it. A household that was already above a cap when it changed keeps every plant it has.

Probably not. A plant can be in one of four states:

• Active — being cared for.
• Archived — a neutral, reversible “not right now”.
• Died or given away — a recorded outcome.

All three non-active states drop the plant out of your default list, out of your plan limit, and out of the reminder scan — so you stop being nagged about it — while keeping its photos and care history. Deleting is a hard delete, meant for genuine mistakes, and it takes the history with it.

Yes — Plants → Import takes a CSV or JSON file, up to 100 plants per import with up to 10 care tasks each. An import is partial-success by design: if you hit your plan’s plant limit part-way through, the rows already created are kept, the rest are reported as skipped, and you are told which. Run it again after freeing space and only the skipped rows need re-adding.

On the Add plant screen, Identify from photo sends one photo to an external identification service and offers up to five suggestions with a confidence percentage. Accepting one fills in the species field for you.

It is metered per household, per calendar month, and resets on the 1st: 1 identification on Seedling, 30 on Garden, 100 on Greenhouse. The app does not show a running count, so the first you’ll hear of the limit is a message when you reach it. An attempt is counted even if the service then fails, so a timeout can still use one.

If the feature isn’t configured on the server you’ll see “Photo identification is unavailable right now” and can still type the species in yourself.

No, it is not a diagnosis, and you should not treat it as one. It is a cosmetic visual check: you photograph one leaf, and an AI model reports what is visible in that single photo — yellowing, browning edges, wilting, spots, visible pests — as “looking healthy”, “worth monitoring” or “needs attention”. It does not identify diseases and cannot see roots, soil, or anything outside the frame. Every result carries its own disclaimer saying so.

It is available on every plan, including free, and requires a household. It is capped at 200 checks per household per calendar month, resetting on the 1st. Running a check adds an entry to your household’s activity feed, so other members can see that you ran one and what the verdict was.

If the server can’t reach the model you are told so — the check fails with “temporarily unavailable” and nothing is analysed. On a demo or preview server you instead get a clearly-labelled demo result that says “Demo result” on the card. Don’t act on that. Either way, you never get an assessment the model did not actually make.

Done records that you actually did it. It writes a completion to the plant’s history and moves the next due date to today plus the task’s frequency.

Snooze just moves the due date without recording that anything was done. The options are 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, or Skip cycle, which pushes it by one full frequency. Snoozing an already-overdue task counts from today, not from the old due date, so it doesn’t land back in the past.

A streak counts consecutive completions where the gap to the previous completion stayed within about 1.5× the task’s frequency. It is a measure of regularity, not punctuality — if you water every nine days on a seven-day task, that is a streak, even though every one of those waterings was late.

The plus matters. Streaks are counted from the last 10 logged completions for the whole plant, shared across all of that plant’s tasks. When an unbroken run uses up every row we can see, we show “10+” rather than “10”, because older care is over the horizon and we won’t report a ceiling as if it were a measurement. The same 10-completion window applies to the care report card on the plant page.

Set a vacation window for yourself. While it is active you get no reminders at all, and your assigned tasks route to whoever you nominated as cover. If you didn’t nominate anyone — or your cover is away too, or has left the household — those tasks roll up into everyone’s reminder instead, so they don’t quietly go unwatered.

Working from the most common cause down:

• Nothing was due. We only remind about tasks due in the next 24 hours or already overdue, and only for active plants.
• You already got one today. There is at most one reminder per person, per household, per channel, per day — and it bundles every due task together rather than pinging per plant.
• The channel is off. In Settings → Notifications, email is on by default; browser notifications are off until you turn them on and grant permission.
• Quiet hours. These pause email (and SMS) inside your window. Nothing is lost — the next hourly pass delivers once the window lifts.
• You’re on vacation. An active vacation window suppresses all of your reminders.
• Browser notifications need more than a tick. See the browser question below.

The scan runs hourly, so a task that becomes due at 09:05 may be notified at 10:00 rather than immediately.

Browser notifications have more moving parts than the other channels:

• Your browser must have granted permission. If you dismissed the prompt rather than allowing it, the setting is not saved. If you blocked it, you have to unblock the site in your browser before the button will work.
• Permission is per browser and per device. Enabling it on your laptop does nothing for your phone.
• Some devices support only foreground notifications — pop-ups while a Family Greenhouse tab is open. When that’s the case the app tells you explicitly that background delivery is unavailable on that device.
• In-tab pop-ups for newly-overdue tasks only appear on the dashboard, and on the first load in a browser session anything already overdue is marked as seen without popping up. Only tasks that cross the line afterwards will announce themselves.

Quiet hours deliberately do not silence browser notifications — your operating system’s own Do Not Disturb handles that better than we can.

The most likely reason is your time zone. Quiet hours are evaluated in the time zone stored on your account, and that defaults to UTC. The settings form pre-fills your browser’s time zone, but it is only saved when you actually press Save quiet hours. If you have never pressed it, your window is being applied in UTC.

Two other things worth knowing: you must set both a start and an end (one alone is rejected), and a window where start and end are identical suppresses nothing. Windows that cross midnight — 22:00 to 07:00 — work as you would expect.

The weekly digest and the annual recap carry an Unsubscribe from these link in the footer, and they are sent with the headers that put a one-click Unsubscribe button at the top of the message in Gmail, Apple Mail and other clients that support them. Either one works in a single click, and neither needs you to be signed in.

For finer control, open Settings → Notifications. Unticking Email stops everything, including task reminders — those carry no unsubscribe link of their own, because they are answering a task you created. If you want reminders but not the Monday summary, untick just Weekly plant digest and leave email on. One email always goes out regardless of preferences: the welcome message when you first create a household.

If you can’t sign in and have no recent digest to unsubscribe from, email support@familygreenhouse.net and we’ll do it for you.

An email summary of what is overdue in your household, sent on Mondays. It is email only — there is no browser or SMS version — and it is skipped entirely for households with nothing overdue, so a quiet week means no email rather than an empty one. It lists up to five plants but the subject line tells you the true total. If it lands during your quiet hours, a later pass the same day delivers it.

An opt-in nudge when one of your plants is entering a typical season for a common pest. Turn them on under Settings → Notifications. They only fire for plants with a species we recognise, at most one pest per plant, and at most once every 90 days for the same plant and pest. They are a seasonal prompt to go and look at the plant — not a detection, and not evidence that anything is actually wrong.

Not right now. SMS is built but switched off — the phone-verification form is hidden and the app will tell you that SMS delivery is not enabled. Email and browser reminders work normally. We haven’t committed to a date for turning it on.

No. Your notification preferences, quiet hours and time zone are stored once per account and apply everywhere. What is per household is the reminder itself: you can receive one reminder per household per day, so being in two households means up to two reminders.

On the Household page, an admin can Generate invite link and send it to whoever should join. They create their own login and land in your household as a member. The link expires after 7 days and can be used by more than one person in that window, so treat it as semi-private and don’t post it publicly. There is no way to revoke an invite early — if one gets out, the safest response is to wait it out and remove anyone unexpected.

Admins alone can:

• Generate invite links
• Change someone’s role, and remove members
• Create and revoke plant-sitter links
• Buy, change or cancel the household’s plan
• Create and revoke API keys

Everything else — adding and editing plants, completing, snoozing and claiming tasks, photos, activity and analytics — is open to every member. Roles are per household, so you can be an admin in one and a member in another.

An admin removes them from the Household page. They immediately lose access to that household’s plants and tasks; their own account and any other households are untouched.

Two rules the app enforces:

• You cannot remove yourself.
• You cannot remove the last admin of a household that still has other members — promote someone else first.

Their history stays, anonymised. Past completions and activity remain so the household’s care record stays intact, but their name is replaced with “Former member”. Anything currently assigned to them becomes unassigned. Worth knowing: a sitter link they created stays active — revoke it separately if you no longer want it working.

You can’t do it yourself yet, and we’d rather say so than let you hunt for the button. Today the options are to ask an admin of that household to remove you, or to delete your whole account — which removes you from every household at once. A leave-but-keep-your-account flow is a known gap.

Member caps are 6 on Seedling, 6 on Garden and 50 on Greenhouse, and they are checked at the moment someone joins. Note that Garden raises your plant limit but not your member limit — Greenhouse is the tier that adds people. Either remove a member you no longer need, or move to Greenhouse.

Yes — your own place, a parent’s plants, a shared house. Use the switcher in the sidebar to move between them or add another. Each household has its own plants, tasks, members, plan and location; there is deliberately no combined “all my plants” view. Your first household stays your default for anything that doesn’t use the switcher.

Your display name, and which tasks you have completed, plus everything in the shared household — plants, tasks, photos, notes and the activity feed. They cannot see your email address, your phone number, or your notification settings.

An admin creates a sitter link on the Household page, choosing how long it should last (up to 60 days; the form suggests 14). You send that link to your sitter — they need no account, no password and no app. The link is shown once, at the moment you create it, so copy it then; we cannot show it to you again afterwards.

Only a to-do list. The page shows, for tasks due in the next 7 days or overdue:

• the plant’s name
• what needs doing (water, fertilise, prune, repot, or your custom task name)
• when it is due, and whether it is overdue
• which space the plant is in, and its placement note

They cannot see your household members’ names or contact details, your saved location, plant or task notes, photos, the activity feed, analytics, your plan or billing, or any other household. They cannot even see plants that have nothing due.

One caveat you control: plant names, space names and placement notes are your own free text, and the sitter sees them verbatim. If a plant is called something you wouldn’t hand to a neighbour, rename it first.

One thing: they can mark a listed task done. They cannot add, edit or delete plants or tasks, snooze anything, upload photos, invite anyone, or reach settings. Their completions are recorded as “a plant sitter” rather than attributed to you or to any named person, and they advance the task’s schedule exactly as your own completions do.

An admin revokes the link on the Household page and it stops working immediately. Otherwise it expires by itself on the date you chose, at most 60 days out. Anyone holding the link can use it — it is the credential, so only send it to someone you trust, and revoke it if you forward it to the wrong person.

The free Seedling plan is a real plan, not a trial: a couple and their plants — one home, up to 3 members and 20 plants, with no card required and no expiry. It includes plants and photos, unlimited tasks and reminders, invites and task claiming, one plant-sitter link at a time (up to 7 days), climate tips, the last 30 days of analytics, the calendar feed, data export, and leaf-health checks each month.

The paid plans are drawn on homes and hands, not on how many plants you own. Garden is for a household that has to coordinate: one home, unlimited members, 200 plants, your full analytics history, and the AI care assistant. Greenhouse is for many homes and many hands: belong to every household you help with, unlimited members, 5,000 plants, and API keys on top. Plant identification is available on every plan, with a monthly allowance that grows with the tier. Export and your care history are never behind a plan.

Only an admin of that household, from Settings → Billing on the web. Plans belong to households, not to people: one subscription covers everyone in that household, and if you belong to two households each has its own plan. Purchases are not available inside the iOS and Android apps.

Not any more. Both tiers are sold monthly only — Garden at $4.99 a month and Greenhouse at $9.99 a month. Annual billing and the one-off Garden lifetime purchase have been withdrawn from sale. If you already hold an annual or lifetime plan you keep it on the terms and the price you bought it at: annual subscriptions go on renewing, and a lifetime tier stays yours permanently.

Yes — every new subscription starts with a 14-day free trial. Checkout collects a card up front, and billing begins when the trial ends unless you cancel before then. Cancelling during the trial leaves you on the free Seedling plan.

Go to Settings → Billing and press Manage subscription. That opens our payment provider’s billing portal, which is the only place a live subscription can be changed or cancelled — you must be an admin of the household.

Cancelling does not cut you off on the spot. You keep the paid plan until the end of the period you have already paid for, and the billing page shows the date it ends. After that the household drops to the free Seedling plan.

The same Manage subscription button stays available after you cancel, so you can still reach your invoices and receipts.

Nothing is deleted. Ever. If you drop to a plan whose caps you are over, every plant and every member stays exactly where it is, and all of it stays readable and editable. Your tasks keep running and your reminders keep arriving.

The only thing that changes is that you can’t add more plants or members until you are back under the cap — the billing page shows a warning telling you where you stand. Archiving plants you are no longer caring for is the quickest way back under a plant cap.

Two features do switch off with the tier: the AI care assistant needs Garden or above, and API keys need Greenhouse.

Because a second checkout would start a second subscription alongside the first and bill you twice. While you have a live subscription, tier changes go through Manage subscription instead, and the app refuses a second purchase rather than risking the double charge. If you own Garden outright through one of the earlier lifetime purchases, there is nothing left to buy at that tier and we won’t sell it to you again.

Email support@familygreenhouse.net with the date and amount and we’ll investigate. Please don’t send card details. Your invoices are in the billing portal behind Manage subscription. We don’t publish a refund policy, so anything in that territory is handled case by case — ask.

A chat assistant, included with Garden and Greenhouse, that can look at your household’s plants, your upcoming tasks and your local climate, and search our plant-care knowledge base to answer questions.

It cannot create anything. When it suggests a reminder you get a proposal card, and the task only exists once you press Create. It won’t give pesticide or fertiliser dosing beyond published nursery guidance, won’t identify a plant from a written description, and if it can’t verify the numbers in an answer against its sources it says so rather than guessing.

Usage is metered per household per month and shown as a percentage on the chat page. Conversations are shared within the household and are kept for 30 days, then deleted automatically.

From Settings → Account & data, two different downloads:

• Download full data (JSON) — the complete one. Your profile, your notification preferences, and for every household you belong to: its name, your role, all plants (including archived, died and given-away ones) and all tasks.
• CSV — two spreadsheet files, one of plants and one of tasks, for your currently selected household only. Handy for a spreadsheet, but a narrower slice.

Both download straight to your device; nothing is emailed and there is no waiting. Neither export includes photo image files, task completion history, the activity feed, or other members’ details — plants carry a link to their current photo, not the image itself.

Settings → Account & data → Delete my account. It is immediate and permanent — there is no grace period and no undo, so export first if you want a copy.

Deleted outright: your login, your notification preferences and phone verification, your browser notification subscriptions, and your delivery history.

For a household where you were the only member, the whole household goes with you — plants, tasks, photos, spaces, chat, sitter links and activity.

For a household with other people in it, the shared record survives without you. Plants, tasks and photos you created stay, and past completions and activity stay so the household’s history remains intact — but your name on them is replaced with “Former member”. Anything assigned to you becomes unassigned.

One blocker: if you are the only admin of a household that still has other members, deletion is refused until you promote someone else. Promote them, then try again.

No — and this is the one thing on this page we most want you to read. Account deletion does not tell our payment provider anything. A subscription will keep billing after your account is gone.

Cancel first, delete second. Go to Settings → Billing, press Manage subscription, cancel there, and only then delete your account. If you have already deleted an account and think you are still being charged, email support@familygreenhouse.net straight away and we will sort it out.

Yes. Email support@familygreenhouse.net from the address on the account; we may ask you to confirm ownership, and we respond within 30 days. The account deletion page has the full instructions.

Not directly — there is no delete-household button. A household is only destroyed as a side effect of the last remaining member deleting their account. If you need one removed and that route doesn’t fit, email support@familygreenhouse.net and ask.

Reading your household’s data from your own scripts or home-automation setup — a read-only API for plants, tasks and activity, plus an optional scope for completing and snoozing tasks. Creating one needs Greenhouse and household admin. The key is shown once when you create it and we only store a hash, so if you lose it you revoke it and make another. Keys don’t expire; revoking is instant.

Two things, and both are worth knowing before you rely on the app:

• No notifications at all. Push notifications are not shipped in the mobile apps, and web push doesn’t work inside them either. Reminders reach you by email; the notification settings screen deliberately hides the controls it cannot honour.
• No purchases. Plans can be viewed but not bought or changed in the app. Use the website for anything to do with billing.

Everything else — plants, tasks, households, sitters, chat — works the same.

No. There was one, but it only recoloured the page background and left cards and forms unreadable, so it was removed rather than left half-working. It will come back when the components have real dark variants. Settings → Preferences currently offers display density (cozy or compact) only, and that choice is saved per device.

English only today. The translation machinery is in place and there are partial non-English files, but we keep the language picker hidden until a real human has translated and reviewed them — a half-translated interface is worse than an honest monolingual one. The picker will reappear on its own when that work lands.

Treat them as prompts to go and look, not measurements. Climate tips need a saved household location and come from a public weather service: low-humidity warnings for tropicals, freeze alerts for plants in outdoor spaces, and skip-watering suggestions on rainy days — the last of which only applies to outdoor spaces you have marked as rain-exposed, so a covered porch stays on its normal schedule.

Placement checks compare a space’s light level and pet access, if you have recorded them, against care data for recognised species. Unknown details never produce a warning — which means silence is not a clean bill of health.

None of this is regulated horticultural advice. If a plant is valuable or sentimental, don’t rely on our reminders alone.

Check the status page first — it checks our API live and will tell you if the problem is ours. If everything there is green, try a reload, then email support@familygreenhouse.net with what you did, what you expected and what happened. Never include a password or a sign-in code.