70 out of 100. That is the health score GardenBuddy Check handed a lettuce on a back deck this week, along with a diagnosis of water stress at 40% confidence and a polite suggestion to stick a finger 3–4cm into the soil before doing anything else. The lettuce will be fine. The feature behind it just had its biggest update since launch, and two things changed: the plant identification got sharper, and your checks now have a memory.
What one check gives you
You photograph the plant, and GardenBuddy Check comes back with a full read, not a one word answer:
- What the plant is. Matched against our crop catalogue, with a link to the growing guide for your climate zone when we recognise it.
- What it sees. A plain description of the photo: leaf colour, texture, damage, even that your pots are crowded against the downpipe. If the description is wrong, you know not to trust the rest, which is exactly how it should work.
- The most likely causes, ranked. Not one verdict. In the lettuce check above it weighed water stress at 40%, a simply healthy plant at 35%, and downy mildew at 15%, with the evidence for each spelled out. A tool that admits the plant might be fine is a tool you can argue with.
- A health score out of 100. One number to track over time.
- What to do. Concrete steps, starting with the free ones. Check the soil before you buy anything.
- What to photograph next if the answer is genuinely uncertain from that angle.
The identification got sharper
Until last week the catalogue behind the identification was vegetables only, 70 crops. Point it at a fruit tree and it had to pick the nearest vegetable, which is how an avocado flower once got confidently called fennel. That failure taught us three things, and we shipped all three:
- Fruit and nut trees are in the catalogue now. 30 of them, avocados included, alongside the 70 vegetable crops.
- It can say “this is outside my list”. When your plant is not in either catalogue, you get its best species guess named as a guess, instead of a wrong match dressed up as a fact.
- The vision model got a serious upgrade. Each check now costs us roughly twice as much to run as before. We wore the cost, because a cheaper answer that misreads your tree is worth exactly nothing.
New: your checks now have a history
Under the check widget there is a new panel called My past checks, for Pro members and Plant Check pass holders. Every diagnosis you have run is in there, newest first: the date, the plant, the issue, the confidence, the health score at a glance, and the full analysis with your photos a tap away.
That is the part that matters for a sick plant, because a single check is a snapshot and recovery is a trend. Photograph the same lettuce this week and next week, and you can put the two checks side by side: health score 70 then, 85 now, browned leaf gone, confidence in “healthy plant” climbing. You stop guessing whether your fix worked. The numbers tell you.
The free check does not keep a history. Run it, read the result, and it is yours to act on there and then, but nothing is stored for later comparison. That is deliberate: history and photo storage are what a paying check buys, not a side effect of running one.
On privacy, since photos of your garden are photos of your home
Three things worth knowing. Location data embedded by your phone camera is stripped from every stored photo. Stored photos are visible only to you when logged in, served through an authenticated endpoint. And direct file links to the photo folder are blocked at the server, so there is no public URL to your garden bed. This was built in before the history feature shipped, not bolted on after.
The numbers
- Free: 1 check per month for any logged in member, no history. Try it at the free plant check page.
- Plant Check pass: $5 for a single check when you need an answer today, kept in your history with the photo.
- Pro: 20 checks per month, full history and week-to-week comparison, at $7.99 a month or $59 a year.
If you only ever need one diagnosis, the free check will do you. If you actually garden, plants get sick more than once a month, and the history is the difference between treating a plant and tracking one. Go Pro from $59 a year and your next sick plant comes with a paper trail.
The lettuce got watered, by the way. No follow up photo yet. The soil test came first, as instructed.
