Terms

Last updated: August 12, 2026.

I'm Stephen — I built and run Plant Tender. These are the rules for using it. They're written in plain English on purpose. If a sentence here reads like it's trying to sneak something past you, tell me and I'll fix it.

By creating an account, or by using the site or the app, you're agreeing to what's on this page.

What Plant Tender does

Plant Tender helps you keep track of your plants. You take readings with a cheap soil meter, upload the occasional photo, and the app tells you which plants need water, which are fine, and which look like they're headed for trouble. Claude (Anthropic's AI) reads the meter photos and helps identify plants and diagnose problems. Sibling section: the Privacy page explains exactly what data moves where.

Your account

You need an account to use the app. When you make one:

• Give me a real email — otherwise password resets and billing receipts won't reach you.
• Don't share your password. Each person in your household should have their own login inside your Home.
• Owners can invite members, managers, and sitters into their Home. When you invite someone, you're telling me it's fine to give them access to your plants, your readings, and your photos. Un-invite them from the Home settings page when they should no longer have access.
• Keep your login secure. If someone gets into your account, they can see and edit everything in your Home.

If you sign in with Google or Facebook, you're relying on Google's or Meta's authentication. If your Google or Facebook account is compromised, so is your Plant Tender account.

The free plan and Pro

The free plan lets you track up to 3 plants. That's not a trial — it's a real free tier that stays free.

Pro removes the limit for $5.99/month or $29.99/year, billed by Stripe. Prices are in US dollars. If I change pricing I'll email you before your next renewal and give you the option to cancel before the new price kicks in.

Cancelling: you can cancel Pro any time from the Home settings page. When you cancel, you keep Pro until the end of the billing period you already paid for, and then your Home reverts to the free plan. Plants above the free-plan limit stay in your account — you just can't add new ones past 3 until you resubscribe.

Refunds: I don't do automatic refunds, but if something is genuinely wrong — you were double-charged, you cancelled and it renewed anyway, the app was broken for a stretch of your billing period — email me and I'll refund whatever's fair. I'd rather do that than argue with anyone.

Photos and content you upload

The photos you upload — of your plants, of your meter — are yours. Uploading them gives me permission to store them in your Home, show them back to you in the app, and send them to Claude so the app can do plant ID, health diagnosis, and meter OCR. That's it. I don't use them for anything else, I don't publish them, and I don't sell them.

If you delete a plant or your account, the associated photos get deleted with it.

What the AI can and can't do

Claude is genuinely useful for the things Plant Tender uses it for — reading a soil meter, identifying a species, spotting a plant that looks stressed. It's also not a licensed anything. Its advice is a strong hint, not a diagnosis. If your plant is expensive, rare, or emotionally important, cross-check anything the app tells you with an actual person who knows plants.

I do my best to keep the model choices sensible and the prompts calibrated, but I can't promise the AI is always right. Treat it like a knowledgeable friend, not a specialist.

Things you shouldn't do

Don't try to break the app. Concretely, don't:

• Try to read or modify other Homes' data. Every table is scoped to a Home ID for exactly this reason, and I'd notice.
• Automate abuse of the AI endpoints — mass photo uploads that aren't real plants, prompt-injection attempts through the identify/diagnose/support paths.
• Send junk into the support inbox. There's a real person reading it (me).
• Upload anything illegal, or anything you don't have the right to upload.
• Use the app to store data that isn't about plants and plant care. It's not a general-purpose photo host.

If you do any of the above I may suspend or delete your account, and I'll email you the reason.

Termination

You can delete your account whenever you want, from the Home settings page. That removes everything tied to your Home. It's immediate and it's real; I can't undo it.

I can suspend or terminate your account if you break the "things you shouldn't do" list, if your payment fails and stays failed after Stripe's normal retry window, or if I have to shut the whole service down. If I ever have to shut the service down, I'll email active accounts with as much notice as I can reasonably give and a way to export your data.

Availability

Plant Tender is one person's software running on a shared platform. I aim for high uptime and I've built in enough of a safety net that a bad deploy self-corrects, but I can't promise 100% availability. Occasionally the app will be down for a few minutes. If it's down for longer, email me and I'll tell you what's going on.

Liability

Plant Tender is a tool to help you care for plants. It's not a plant insurance policy.

If a plant dies while you're using Plant Tender — because the app got a reading wrong, because you were on vacation and the sitter misread the verdict, because the moisture threshold I baked in for a species doesn't match your specific pot — that's a real bummer, and I'm sorry, but I can't be on the hook for the plant. To the extent the law allows, the most I can owe you for any dispute related to the app is what you've paid me in the last 12 months.

I'm not disclaiming the things you can't disclaim in your jurisdiction. The above applies to the extent it's legally allowed.

Changes to these terms

If I change something material here — pricing, cancellation, how liability works — I'll email active account owners before the change takes effect. Cosmetic edits (typo fixes, clearer wording) I'll just make.

If you keep using the app after a material change goes into effect, that counts as accepting the new version. If you don't want to accept it, delete your account before the effective date.

The lawyerly bits

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States. If there's a dispute, my strong preference is that we start it in email — [email protected] — and try to work it out there. If we can't, courts in the United States get jurisdiction.

If any single sentence in this document turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

Contact

[email protected] — for anything on this page, or if a term seems unfair, or if you want to tell me you noticed I'm still writing "I" instead of "we" all the way through. It's me on the other end.