Privacy

Last updated 8 November 2026

PlantSowGrow needs an account so your garden is kept safe and can move with you to a new phone. We store only what the app needs to work. There is no advertising and no third-party analytics. We never sell your data, and we only pass it to the service providers named below, each for the one job it does for us.

Your account

You can sign in with Apple or with your email address: we email you a 6-digit code, so there is no password. We keep your email address, your title (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Mx, or none if you prefer not to say), first name and surname, which sign-in methods you use, and the gardening experience level you choose. We may use your title in aggregate, anonymous statistics about who uses the app. With Sign in with Apple you can choose to hide your email; we then receive a private relay address. Sign-in codes are sent through Cloudflare's email service.

Your garden

Your gardens, plants, tasks, notes, the town you chose and your photos are saved on your phone and copied to your account so they are backed up and appear on any phone you sign in on. They are stored on Cloudflare's infrastructure (database and file storage) and are only readable by you and by us for support and running the service.

PlantSowGrow Plus purchases

PlantSowGrow is free to use; PlantSowGrow Plus is an optional subscription (or one-off lifetime purchase). Payment is handled entirely by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play) — we never see your card or bank details. To know which accounts have Plus, the app uses RevenueCat, a purchase-management service: it receives your PlantSowGrow account id and the purchase receipt from the store, and tells us which product you bought, when it renews or ends, and whether it is a trial. We keep that purchase status with your account.

App usage counts

The app tells our own server about a few moments that help us price PlantSowGrow fairly: when it is opened, when a free limit is reached, when the PlantSowGrow Plus screen is shown, and whether a purchase starts or finishes. Each note carries a random id made by the app (not a device identifier), your account id when you are signed in, the platform and the app version. No location, contacts or screen-by-screen tracking, and nothing goes to an analytics company. These notes are deleted with your account.

Plant doctor

When you ask the plant doctor about a photo, that photo, the plant's name and any note you type are sent from our server to Anthropic's Claude service to get the answer (or, if it is unavailable, to Google's Gemini service), on paid plans under which neither company uses them to train its models. The answer is saved in your account so you can read it again and follow its steps.

We keep a copy of each plant doctor check on our servers: the photo, the plant's name, your note, the instructions we sent to the AI service and the answer it gave. We use these copies only to make the plant doctor better: we look at answers to find mistakes, and we use the photos and answers to test, compare and train plant-health models of our own. They are private, stored on Cloudflare's infrastructure, readable only by us, never sold, never shown to anyone else and never used for advertising. If we ever share examples publicly, for instance to explain how the plant doctor works, we will ask you first. These copies are deleted with your account, and you can ask us at any time to delete them sooner (support@plantsowgrow.com).

When you suggest a plant for the catalogue, the plant name you type is checked the same way (Anthropic's Claude, or Google's Gemini as a fallback) to see whether we already have it under another name. Only the name is sent.

Deleting your data

In the app, Settings → Delete account removes your account and everything in it — gardens, plants, tasks and photos — from our servers straight away. Deleting your account does not cancel a PlantSowGrow Plus subscription — cancel it in your App Store or Google Play account settings. Signing out removes your garden from that phone but keeps it in your account.

You can also ask us to delete your account without the app: see Delete your account.

What else the app contacts

• Plant catalogue — plant information and pictures come from our server. These requests contain nothing about you.
• Your town, frost dates and frost warnings — town searches and frost-date lookups go to our server, which asks the Open-Meteo weather service for the town's coordinates, rounded to about 10 km. Open-Meteo never sees anything about you.
• Purchases — when you open the PlantSowGrow Plus screen or buy, the app talks to the App Store or Google Play and to RevenueCat as described above.
• Sign-in providers — when you use Sign in with Apple, Apple handles the sign-in and tells us who you are. Apple's own privacy policy applies to that step.

Like any website, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) processes the IP address of each request to deliver it and protect the service.

Camera and photos

You add photos to a plant, a finished job or the plant doctor yourself. On iPhone the app asks for camera or photo library access the first time. On Android it uses the system's photo picker and the camera app, so it needs no access to your photo library: it only receives the photo you choose. Photos you add are saved to your account as described above. When you use Share, you choose where the picture goes.

Notifications

Task reminders are scheduled on your phone by the app itself. Weather warnings (frost, strong winds, hail, very heavy rain, and blight weather for potato and tomato growers) are sent by our server through Apple's push service on iPhone, which needs your phone's push token and time zone. On Android the app schedules frost warnings itself from the forecast it fetches when you open it; the other weather warnings are on iPhone only for now. You can turn reminders and warnings off in the app's settings at any time.

Children

PlantSowGrow is made for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children; if you think a child has made an account, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the date at the top will change with it. Questions: info@plantsowgrow.com.