Planter: Garden Planner

What it does

Planter is a comprehensive garden planning tool designed for home gardeners. It allows users to create visual layouts of their garden beds, using a square-foot gardening approach. The app features an extensive encyclopedia of plants with detailed information on care, pests, and companion planting. Its standout feature is a dynamic growing calendar that adapts to the user's local frost dates to provide personalized planting and harvesting schedules.

Where it shines

Planter excels by combining deep utility with a simple, intuitive interface. The magic happens when the user sets their local frost dates (01:08). The app then transforms its generic plant data into a personalized action plan, with a visual calendar at 01:40 showing exactly when to start seeds, transplant, and harvest each plant. This turns abstract information into a concrete, actionable guide.

The app also caters to serious hobbyists with features like the "Seed Box" (11:11), which allows for granular inventory management, including the year seeds were purchased and how full the packet is. Finally, the garden editing experience is fluid, offering a "quick plant" mode (05:12) for rapid layout creation and advanced tools like multi-select (06:24) for easy rearrangement.

UX highlights

Contextual Actions: Instead of a persistent toolbar, a long-press on a plant (06:09) reveals a radial menu with relevant actions like copy, info, and compost.
Flexible Interaction Modes: The app supports multiple ways to add plants, from drag-and-drop to a rapid-fire tap mode, accommodating different user preferences and tasks.
Comprehensive Filtering: The plant library (08:38) has robust filtering options for attributes like frost tolerance, season, and sun needs, making it easy to find the right plants.
Data-Rich Detail Views: Each plant screen is a mini-encyclopedia, covering everything from companion plants and nutrition to pests and beneficial critters (02:30).
Non-Blocking Onboarding: The app uses dismissible tooltips (00:26) to teach users as they go, avoiding a mandatory tutorial and getting them to the core task immediately.
Customization: Users aren't limited to the built-in library; they can create their own custom plants with unique icons and details (09:20).

Monetization & growth

The app uses a soft paywall strategy. Core features like creating one garden and browsing plants are free, but advanced capabilities trigger a subscription prompt. For example, when the user tries to create a note or export a PDF, a paywall appears (01:43). The offer includes a 1-week free trial for an annual plan at $24.99, alongside a lifetime option for $99.99. After a successful purchase, a celebratory confetti animation plays (13:35), and the UI immediately reflects the unlocked status.

Who it’s for

This app is built for home gardeners of all skill levels, from beginners planning their first vegetable patch to experienced enthusiasts managing a large seed collection. Its focus on the square-foot gardening method makes it particularly useful for those with raised beds or limited space. The depth of its plant database and scheduling tools suggests it's for users who want to move beyond casual gardening and actively plan and track their progress throughout the season.

Notes & opportunities

While incredibly powerful, the sheer density of information on plant detail screens could be overwhelming for a novice. A simplified view or a more guided first-plant-selection process could improve the initial experience. Some powerful features, like the copy-paste function in the radial menu (06:10), are not explicitly introduced and rely on user discovery. A one-time tooltip for this could increase its usage. Finally, the garden summary (07:21) is useful but could be made more actionable by including estimated harvest dates based on the calendar data.