Planty
2026 — PresentA small app for tracking when plants need to be watered and sharing that responsibility across a home.
We had plants, and kept running into the same issue — some got watered too often, others were forgotten. Existing apps felt overcomplicated or oddly neglected, with subscriptions and features that didn't help with the actual problem.
So I built Planty: a small, focused tool that tracks watering cycles, sends reminders at the right time, and works across shared homes so multiple people can take care of the same plants without stepping on each other. It runs as a PWA, so it installs on your phone and behaves like a native app.
How it works
The core idea is very simple: plants have watering cycles, and the app makes sure you do not forget them.
Most of the product is actually the notification system. Everything else exists to make those reminders reliable and meaningful in real use:
- each plant has its own schedule
- notifications are sent at chosen time
- multiple people can share responsibility inside a 'home'
- changes are reflected across devices through a synced backend
Don't overthink
The app itself is intentionally minimal. The complexity is not in what you see, but in how quietly it behaves correctly in the background across users, devices, and time.
Auth & shared homes
Google authentication keeps onboarding friction low, while shared homes allow multiple users to manage the same set of plants with clear ownership. State is synced across devices so changes made by one person are immediately visible to others, avoiding conflicts or duplicate actions.
Background jobs and notification scheduling
Behind the scenes, jobs handle scheduling and delivery of reminders, with safeguards to prevent duplication, drift, or inconsistent states. Reminders are scheduled based on plant cycles and need to stay reliable over time, even with delays, missed triggers, or user inactivity.
PWA behavior
The app runs as an installable PWA, which allows it to behave like a native app on mobile, including persistent sessions and notifications.
Usage
I originally built Planty for myself and my wife, but after sharing it with friends, a few of them started using it as well. That was enough validation that the idea was useful in a very practical, low-friction way.
Planty ended up being less about plants and more about how fragile 'simple' systems become once you try to make them reliable.
Even a small feature like a reminder involves a chain of dependencies that can break in subtle ways. Notifications, scheduling, syncing state, handling multiple users. Each piece is simple on its own, but getting them to work together consistently is where the real complexity shows up.
It was a useful reminder that small products are not necessarily simple products.