Frequently asked.

No. Open the app and you can identify three plants a day as a guest, and ten on your first day. Make a free account and the daily allowance goes up to five, plus your collection syncs between phones and sessions.

Identifying from a photo, name search, health checks, saving up to ten plants, care reminders, the light meter, pet safety notes, and browsing all work as a guest. A free account backs your collection up and syncs it between devices, adds plant chat, and raises your daily lookups from three to five. It costs nothing and takes a moment.

Yes. Pocket Botanist is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and on Google Play for Android. The same features and your synced collection work on both.

Premium is a subscription billed through the App Store or Google Play, with monthly and annual options, a lifetime option, and a 7-day free trial on the monthly and annual plans. Open the app and tap any Premium feature to see the current price in your local currency. Cancel any time from your App Store or Google Play account.

Pocket Botanist is made by Seamless Logic, a small independent studio. No ads, no data sold to advertisers, no venture-capital pressure to grow at any cost. You can write to us at hello@pocketbotanist.app and a real person will reply.

Email us at support@pocketbotanist.app and a real person will reply. It helps to tell us your device, your app version (Settings, then Help), and what happened. If it is about an identification, let us know the plant you expected. You can also answer "Not quite" to the "Did we get this right?" question on any result, which tells us the match was off.

Premium is billed by the App Store or Google Play, so you manage it there. On iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On Android, open Google Play, tap your profile, then Payments and subscriptions. You keep Premium until the end of the period you already paid for. If something looks wrong with billing, write to us at support@pocketbotanist.app.

For common houseplants and garden species in good light, accuracy is very high. For obscure or near-identical species, the confidence figure drops and an "Other Possibilities" card appears on the result's Science tab, listing the next likely candidates. When we are not sure, we say so. We would rather be honest than confident.

Open the Science tab on the result and look for "Other Possibilities". It lists the runner-up matches with their own confidence figures, and tapping one opens its full details. The card only appears when the match was genuinely close, so a confident identification will not have one. There is also a "Did we get this right?" question on the result itself, and answering "Not quite" helps us improve. For how we think about accuracy and the confidence figure, see our methodology.

Partially. The camera, your collection, notes, and reminders all work offline. The identification and diagnosis steps need a network round-trip because the model runs on a server.

Yes, all of the above. Pocket Botanist covers about 412,000 species across flowering plants, trees, shrubs, succulents, herbs, fungi, and ferns. It will tell you when something is outside its training.

Most identifications return in about a second after you press the shutter. The model runs on a server, so a strong network connection helps. You see the common name, the scientific name, the family, and a confidence figure in the same view.

Identification results include a toxicity note when the species is known to be harmful to cats, dogs, or children. Treat those notes as a starting point, not a substitute for veterinary or medical advice. The app itself collects no personal data unless you choose to sign in. On Home you can snap a plant and ask one thing first: is it toxic, is it an allergy risk, or is it a weed? The toxic and allergy checks are free, and the weed check is Premium. For an example, see our Monstera deliciosa guide for the ASPCA-sourced toxicity note we publish.

No. Identification and diagnosis photos go straight to the AI model and are never stored on a server we operate. The original photo stays on your device. If you save a plant to your collection while signed in, a resized copy is kept in your private cloud storage so it syncs between your devices, and nothing else.

Your collection syncs to Firebase if you are signed in. Reminders live on your device. If you allow location, it is used to tag plants and work out your hardiness zone. For weather and pollen, your coordinates go to our server, which rounds them to about a kilometer and asks Google Maps Platform for the local data, so Google never gets your exact spot from your phone. When you search for a town, your phone's own place search is tried first. Only if your phone cannot search for places does the name you type go to our server and on to Google to look it up. You can turn location off or make it approximate in Settings.

Settings, Account, Delete account. We remove your collection, your saved plants, and your account record within seven days.

Each plant in your collection can have five kinds of reminder: water, fertilize, repot, prune, and mist. Water and feed reminders start from what the species needs, or you can pick 1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days yourself. Set quiet hours so the phone will not buzz at midnight. Notifications are local, so they work offline. You can also log an inspection or a leaf clean against a plant, though those two are not scheduled.

Hold your phone where a plant would sit and it reads the light in lux, tells you whether that counts as bright, medium, or low, and shows which of your plants would suit the spot. It is free and needs no account.

Yes, and it is free, with or without an account. Garden zones let you group plants into the rooms and areas they actually occupy and mark each one indoor, outdoor, or greenhouse, so care suits where the plant really is. Room-aware care settings per zone and muting a zone are Premium.

Vacation mode, on Premium, pauses every reminder for the dates you are away and re-anchors your care to the day you get back, so nothing is waiting overdue when you walk in. It quiets frost, heat, and streak alerts too. Set it on each device before you leave.

Yes, on Premium. Propagation tracking keeps them separate from your established plants so you can watch them come along without cluttering the collection.

Yes, on Premium. Open Settings, then Privacy and Data, then Export plant collection. You can take it as a PDF field-book with plate-numbered pages and your own notes, a CSV spreadsheet, or GeoJSON map data.

Yes, and that part is free with an account. Settings, then Privacy and Data, then Import plant collection restores your plants from a file you exported earlier.

Yes, and it is free. Open a plant and tap Plant settings to say whether it lives in a pot or the ground, indoors or out, how much light it gets, and how big the pot is. Its reminders and watering fit it better. You can also set where it lives by searching for your town or tapping Use where I am now. With Premium you can drop a pin on the map too.

No. After a diagnosis you see the first treatment step free, so you know what to try tonight. Premium shows the full, dated plan you can tick off as you go.