Three plans. Free, Starter ($3.99 a month or $29 a year), and Pro ($7.99 a month or $59 a year). I reckon the question really is just one thing, do you want your own private garden journal and the weekly email in your inbox, or are the free price and planting tools enough for you.
Side by side
| Capability | Free | Starter | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live supermarket price tracker (76 veggies, daily) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Climate zone planting guides (728 pages) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Plant Now tool | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Demo garden tour | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 12 month price chart per veggie | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Private garden journal (beds, plants, harvests) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Care log (watering, fertilising, mulching, pest) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Pest observations and treatment tracking | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Grow vs buy ROI report | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Harvest history and CSV export | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Weekly Gardener Digest email | ✓ | ||
| Moon, Biodynamic and Electroculture signals | ✓ | ||
| Price drop alerts for crops you grow | ✓ | ||
| Pest emergence alerts (weather triggered) | ✓ | ||
| Monthly | $0 | $3.99 | $7.99 |
| Annual | $0 | $29 | $59 |
| Annual saves vs monthly | ~40% | ~38% |
Free, when it’s enough
Free is the right plan if you treat Garden Buddy as a reference site and not a tracking tool. You’ll use it to check what’s cheap or expensive at the shops this week, look up planting times for your zone, and have a look at the demo garden every now and then to see what I’m doing.
You won’t track your own beds, plants or harvests. You won’t get the weekly email. You won’t see any ROI numbers on your own crops. That’s fine if all you wanted from Garden Buddy is decision support for shopping and planting. For that it’s still the most accurate Australian source I’m aware of, and free stays free, there’s no timed trial running out on you.
Starter, the actual product
Starter is where the My Garden side of the site unlocks. This is where most of what I built the plugin for actually lives. For $3.99 a month or $29 a year you get:
- Unlimited beds, plants and harvests. Log as much as you want to log.
- Full care log. Every watering, fertiliser, mulch and pest treatment. Each entry captures the product used, quantity, weather at the time, and soil temperature.
- ROI report. Real grow vs buy savings, calculated against today’s shop prices and updated the moment you log a harvest.
- Pest observation tracking with treatment product and effectiveness review.
- Harvest history with CSV export for your own record.
If you’re going to keep a vegetable journal at all, this is the tier I’d pick. The annual plan at $29 breaks down to $2.42 a month, which is less than a cup of coffee and somwhat less than most seed packets I buy anyway.
Sample scenario, based on demo garden data
Pro, the weekly digest tier
Pro adds the personalised weekly email, the four planting schools (Traditional, Moon, Biodynamic, Electroculture), and weather triggered pest alerts.
Worth the extra $30 a year if any of these is true for you:
- You’d actually read a weekly email about your garden instead of remembering to log in.
- You follow moon planting, the biodynamic calendar or electroculture, and you want that week’s signal sitting in your inbox on a Sunday.
- You want to be told “cabbage white butterflies are emerging this week, net your brassicas now” a day or two before you see the damage.
- You grow crops where a sudden price spike actually matters to you (capsicum, broccoli, lettuce in a bad year).
Not worth it if you’re happy logging into the site once a week anyway, don’t follow any planting school, and your crops sit in the stable price band. Starter covers you.
Annual or monthly
Annual saves you about two months’ worth every year. Same product either way, so in my view the choice comes down to whether you’d rather pay once a year and forget about it, or keep the option of walking away after any month. Two practical differences:
Choose monthly if
- You want to test the product for a few months before you commit.
- You only garden in one season and pause the rest of the year.
- You’d rather just cancel, no questions, no refund conversation.
Choose annual if
- You’re confident the product fits your garden.
- You want the ~40% saving.
- You don’t want to think about renewal every month.
- You want one annual receipt for tax or expense tracking.
One click from your account page. Annual cancellations get a prorated refund on the unused months. Cancel after 4 months of a 12 month plan, you get refunded for the 8 unused months. Monthly cancellations stop at the end of the current paid month. No retention loops, no phone calls, nothing like that.
Switching tiers
Upgrade, downgrade, switch from monthly to annual, all one click from your account page at any time.
- Upgrade (Starter to Pro). Stripe charges the prorated difference straight away. New tier is active in seconds.
- Downgrade (Pro to Starter). Takes effect on your next renewal date. No refund on the current period.
- Switch monthly and annual. Same as upgrade or downgrade. Prorated either way.
Test cards and free trial
There’s no formal free trial, but the cancellation rules effectively give you one. Sign up annual, use the product for a month, cancel, and you’ll get a prorated refund for the 11 unused months. Net cost ends up being about one month at the monthly rate, and I think that’s a fair way of letting you test it without me running a separate trial flow.
If you just want to see the product first without paying anything at all, my demo garden shows you exactly what you get on the inside. Same UI, same features, real plants, real numbers.