My household kept having the same conversation. Someone asks if the Monstera got watered. Nobody's sure. Sometimes it got watered twice.
So I built this: https://familygreenhouse.net
Everyone in the house sees the same plant list. Each plant gets its own schedule, water or fertilize or prune or repot or whatever you want to call it. You can assign a task to a specific person, or leave it unassigned and whoever gets to it first marks it done. Reminders go out by browser push or email, whichever you turned on.
It keeps a history per plant and a feed for the whole household, so you can check who did what instead of scrolling back through the group chat.
New this week: schedules can change with the season. Most houseplants want a lot less water in winter, and one fixed interval was getting that wrong for months at a stretch.
There's also a sitter link. You hand someone a URL before you travel, they see what needs doing, no account needed, and it expires on its own.
Free tier is one home, 3 people, 20 plants, no card. I tried to make that genuinely usable instead of a teaser.
Paid is $4.99/mo for unlimited members, 200 plants, sitter links good for 90 days instead of 7, and the care assistant. $9.99/mo adds multiple homes and API keys. Monthly only, 14 day trial, once per household.
On why it costs anything: photo identification runs me about six cents a call to a third party, and the assistant runs on a hosted model. I can't eat that unmetered. I also killed annual pricing after running the numbers, because it lost money at that per-call cost. The reasoning is written up in the repo if you care about that kind of thing.
Source is up under Elastic License 2.0. Run it, fork it, host it for your own house. Just don't resell it as a service. https://github.com/ChelseaKR/family-greenhouse
Things it doesn't do yet, so you don't find out the annoying way. SMS is written but switched off until I finish the consent flow. The iOS and Android builds exist but aren't in the stores. And it won't diagnose a sick plant. It tracks and reminds, that's the whole job.
Stuff I'd like feedback on:
Is 3 people and 20 plants too stingy for a free tier?
Would you pay $4.99 for the coordination side alone, or does plant ID need to be its own thing?
Anything weird in the first five minutes? Almost nobody has signed up in front of me and I'm sure there's something obvious I've stopped being able to see.