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Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6k plants (getanyplant.com)

427 points by ryebread777 ↗ HN
I’ve loved keeping plants since I was a kid. But the online world of plants can be confusing - strange vocabulary, plants going by conflicting names, and hundreds of niche websites. I wanted to create a site that would organize all of this info and make it easier to explore and discover new plants. That’s why I created GetAnyPlant, which aggregates and matches plants from dozens of online stores. It includes huge amounts of data on these plants along with filters and categories to help you search. You can also save plants to your wishlist and add notes to them.

I’m a data scientist by profession, so probably 80% of the work was totally new to me. I built v1 using wordpress , v2 using django, and v3 I pivoted to using react and next js for frontend.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.

137 comments

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piva00
What a great idea! I'm also quite in love with keeping plants and have found similar issues on conflicting names, etc.

Don't have much feedback since I'm not in the USA, eagerly waiting for an international expansion to Europe :)) Good luck!

ryebread777
Sorry! I forgot to include a disclaimer that most of the stores are US based right now. I am excited to expand to different countries but there are a few difficult questions to figure out in terms of user experience. I’m hoping to nail the core functionality and then focus on expanding to other countries. Thanks for the comment!
marban
How do you pull in the commercial offers?
pyuser314
Guess: this person is associated with one of the shops to buy.
z3t4
How did you find the images? How did you solve the copyright issue?
ryebread777
Right now either they are from Wikipedia, or they are from one of the stores selling plants. I have been reaching out to many stores to request permission to use their images in this way and luckily a few have been kind enough to grant it. Those are the images I use. If you scroll down far enough though you will see there is still a need for many more.
giarc
Could you use AI to generate images for those you don't have a real photo of yet?
ryebread777
I experimented with that few months ago and it was very bad unfortunately. Though it may have improved. Probably for common plants it would work excellent (bell pepper, monstera) but most of the plants on the site are fairly obscure, especially the ones without images. I wouldn’t want to create a misleading image. Another AI approach might be to create simple illustrations of plants I don’t have images for, using other images as reference. I haven’t explored that yet!
ivolimmen
I am a bit disappointed; I was expecting plants that cost a minimum of 6K... But: I do like the site!
voidUpdate
I was expecting a lot of photos of plants in very high resolution
ryebread777
Don’t worry, If you are interested in buying $6k plants I will create a new site just for you lol
pvg
For that high-end market segment, I'd be thinking recurring revenue - plant subscriptions, plant timeshares, plant concierge service, etc.
ttyprintk
Very true for saltwater aquariums. Plants can be moved in and out, but if your airbnb has a saltwater aquarium, you need the number someone who does house calls.
mft_
As someone that has struggled trying to find plants to suit a particular garden in the past, I love your site!

(And I just spotted the pet safe tab - even better!)

Edit: could you include temperature suitability? Including plants that can or can't cope with snow, for example?

ryebread777
Good idea!! I’ll admit I came at this having much more experience with Houseplants than gardening, but I definitely want it to serve many communities. Thanks for the suggestion! Is that basically the same thing as “zone?” I think that should be doable - I will look into it! Would love to know any other features that would be valuable from the gardening perspective.
mtgentry
Yeah I’d love this too. I live in SoCal and I’m doing my yard with native plants. Some things I’m having trouble finding: 1) plants that bloom in seasons other than spring 2) plants that aren’t native but can work in my climate 3) plants that will do ok in clay soil 4) plants with a small footprint for a small yard. AI has helped a lot but it would still be helpful to have filters like these.
sp332
If you have a USDA zone map, make sure you're using the 2023 version. They hadn't updated the map in... ever, I think?
jihadjihad
This is really cool, congrats on shipping. I've had a hard time finding reliable plant information as well, especially since many sites focus only on indoor plants while others focus only on those you grow outside in a garden, etc. It's nice to be able to search for plants I have inside as well as outside.

Having a filter for the genus is a great idea too!

The search feels a little slow, and it's somewhat finicky: if I type in "ficus ginseng" I don't see a result, apparently because the title is "Ficus 'Ginseng'" so the single quotes are needed.

But I can see myself using this site! Nice work!

ryebread777
Ah, yes you are right about that. The search sucks right now. An even bigger issue is that search only matches in the scientific name but most people are entering common names. Yours is the first user feedback to mention it though so thank you for sharing! I will make it a higher priority to fix.
johncole
How long did it take you to move from v1 to v2 to v3?

Cool site!

ryebread777
Here’s a rough estimate. Though of course this was a side project (~10hrs / week) and much of the time was spent learning.

V1 - Wordpress and jupyter notebooks (2 months)

V2 - Django (7 months)

V3 - Django + React (3 months)

spooky_action
What were the jupyter notebooks for? Did you run your backend in notebooks?
ryebread777
Wordpress version was basically just static plant pages. And I used jupyter notebooks to update them with new data (like product price and availability). Pretty funny to think about now
chelmzy
Would it be possible to add a location filter for native ranges of the plants?
ryebread777
Ooh, I’ve actually been looking into this. It hasn’t been too heavily requested but to me it is a cool feature. I’m curious what you envision by location? Would it be by country? Or something more specific or broad?
soared
For indoor plants, depending on where you live you may have near-zero native plants commonly sold. Native plants tend to make more sense for outdoors, as the indoor climate as closer to tropical-always rather then your real weather.
smusamashah
Nice to see it includes Airplants as well.
vidyesh
Congrats on the tech upgrade!

Since this is not an open source project, before I bombard you with technical questions I have to ask, are you open to discuss the structure of your app? Like about your sources, images, etc?

ryebread777
Sure! Happy to answer most things as I’m looking to share but also to get feedback and new ideas on those topics.
vidyesh
Awesome! Feel free some or all.

Few of my queries you mostly answered elsewhere in your replies about images and how you get the data.

How did you determine which plants to list? Is it just a database of all the unique plants from all sources or just a general plant database?

I see each plant shows price + x stores, does that mean you are archiving the prices and not scraping real time? How are you determining the time interval for that?

How are you handling wrongly or typo listed plants from your sources?

Since you mentioned this is using next and django, what are you using shopify for?

Are you an affiliate for most of them or nothing like that so far?

Sorry I don't really have any valuable feedback apart from what everyone mentioned, Search is really slow.

And some or most external links have an extra / in their hyperlink, so at

  https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/4f5952a72087bce5e5c28a72c76c7563 

  https://planetdesert.com//products
Thank you.
pastor_bob
>Since you mentioned this is using next and django, what are you using shopify for?

Looks like they're just pointing to images hosted by others, most of which are Shopify sellers. One weird trick to save on bandwidth costs...but obviously problematic in the long term.

ryebread777
Currently evaluating alternatives for hosting images rn. Open to any suggestions!
ryebread777
I just list all of the plants sold at any of the stores I currently integrate with. I use a scientific taxonomic name database to make sure that the binomial names (genus, species) are legit and not miss-spelled and all of my liastings are anchored to that. I match products to binomial names through a process thats that uses a really complex regex, plus some manual labeling. Experimenting with using more ML here.

Price/availability data is updated on a nightly basis. Probably want to increase that frequency, though no one has complained about stale data yet, so not high priority.

Getting some affiliate relationships set up right now! Already have two added in the past week.

That extra / is mysterious... I will dive into that after work.

vidyesh
Thank you so much! I am not that experienced building large scale projects so really appreciate your replies in thing post.

I am quite surprised that shopify doesn't have hotlink protection for images!

>I match products to binomial names through a process thats that uses a really complex regex, plus some manual labeling. Experimenting with using more ML here.

Thats what I wondering. I am building something similar, region specific for books and sometimes the names are just a little off or partial or alternate names. I am currently doing a string comparison to match at least 80-90% of the words in the title, which works okay for now. So thank you for the ideas.

Your product update frequency is very interesting, I always thought scraping for price aggregation meant one has to make sure its very frequently updated. My approach is a bit different, it only scrapes on search, so not really scraping all the sites. Not the best approach, but its scary to me to scrape complete websites and that much data lol I currently am not using a db either but scraping and caching for 30mins, that specific item which now I think about is a bad idea if I want to make this a scalable project. I should start using a database indeed.

Some feedback on the UI/UX, instead of having 'All plants' selected on the homepage, it would be nice to instead have a smaller grid of plants from each type/tag on the home page itself. Selecting any of the tag would work the same as now but homepage will have more to explore because currently its just overwhelming to do anything on the homepage. I am just looking in specific tags or just searching.

Edit: This is a great resource for adding more info about pet friendly plants to the listed plants. https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control/toxic-a...

ryebread777
Thanks for the advice! I too am surprised by that. The Django version of my site had something similar! The home page showed plants grouped into categories kind of like Netflix. But when I transitioned to react I limited the scope. But I might go back to that!

One other tip - many sites have APIs that will give you their product data. You may need to contact them about getting access. Or it may be publicly available. But that is better than scraping if it is possible.

the__alchemist
This is great!

Btw, something I learned recently about house plants: In an analogous way to sneakers, there is a large subculture built around certain varieties of them. They get to be expensive, there is a network of trading, there are ones associated with high status, there are knockoffs (not joking) etc. Very interesting! This site does not appear to be about that subculture.

soared
Great idea to avoid the viral varietals as they tend to be more difficult to keep alive since everyone tries to produce them. Also very nice to shop at local stores to avoid the tik tok midnight variegated monstera nonsense!

(Not sure if always but variegated->less green->less chlorophyll->harder to keep alive)

steve_adams_86
I think your last point is always true, yes. I’ve never seen it not be true across a wide range of plants, whether terrestrial or aquatic.
ChainOfFools
Some of them, like clivia, have a non-trivial lottery component to their hybridization and breeding that makes buying and crossing even a couple of relatively er, garden variety examples a potential ticket to fame, fortune and startdom in the clivia-verse.
steve_adams_86
There are also varieties with temporary genetic expressions (often used as knockoffs), so it’s like buying a white sneaker that gradually turns green, haha. Some of these plants are $100-$500 for a 3” pot with a single leaf of growth.

As the new growth appears, the genetic expression is no longer the desired type. It’s a real racket.

nom
An interesting niche I came across is Carnivorous plants, where the seeds of a successful new cross can fetch 1k USD in auction. For a plant that no one knows how it will look yet.

Like this one https://www.carnivero.com/collections/auction-items/products...

People also hike through the remotest areas to find new wild species. Very cool.

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newrotik
I have very recently published a mobile plant identification app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hiddengard...).

It's the first mobile app I have ever written and I enjoyed the process quite a bit!

My main goal was to deliver better identification accuracy than similar apps.

However I also wanted to provide useful plant information along with the identification and naively thought that this would have had to be a solved problem - surely there would be some online DB with all plants data neatly organized (I'd be even happy to pay for it!), in particular plant care information - but alas!

ajnin
That begs the question ... How did you come up with that plant database ?
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voisin
I’d love if this included outdoor plants, shrubs, trees, and had a filter for hardiness zone.
ryebread777
I’m on it! What sorts of things do you care about when you’re looking for outdoor plants? Anything besides hardiness zone? Maybe categories for trees, shrubs, etc?
01100011
Water usage, edible or not, color changing leaves, shade tolerance, soil compatibility, flowers or not, color of flowers.

Not sure if there's a way to say 'messiness factor'... some trees drop a lot of crap besides leaves.

It would be great to find native plants for your area.

zdrummond
This might be a stretch, but I would love to know what outdoor plants are native to my area.
jefb
This would be an awesome feature. It would be a good resource for plant identification and I won't inadvertently introduce an invasive species into my local environment.
phoxtricks
The number one thing to know for outdoor plants is if they are invasive or not.

(So tired of managing Garlic Mustard, Japanese Knotweed, Bittersweet and Buckthorn)

pwenzel
For outdoor plants, I would really want to know what plants are drought tolerant. Climate change is drastically altering summers in Minnesota (wildfire smoke, drought, high AQI, high temps, extreme downpours).

It would also be really great to search for pollinator friendly plants (https://bluethumb.org is an excellent reference)

lordswork
The regions where the plant is considered native, how aggressive it spreads (there is some metric that captures this IIRC), and regions where it is labeled as invasive. The PictureThis app shows this info, and it's incredibly useful.
ccorcos
I’ve been building a permaculture garden and I want to know

- usda hardiness zone - sun/shade tolerance - geographic origin - is it a nitrogen fixer - soil pH preference - wet/dry soil preference - when does it fruit?

This is a decent resource: https://permacultureplantdata.com/

voisin
Maybe to add on: whether it is pollinator friendly, when it blooms (not sure if this differs from fruiting, but I think so?), whether it is edible, part of a guild (if so, show other guild members)
pwenzel
The first thing I looked for was hardiness zone. I live in Minnesota and our weather is...particular.
rubslopes
A bit off topic, but there's a game called Strange Horticulture that I'm playing and loving it. It's a phantasy investigation game. The plants are not real and they have magic properties, but still, I think whoever loves plants will have a lot of fun with it.
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ryebread777
I'll check it out! Sounds kinda similar to a game I'm playing rn on switch called dredge, though that focuses on fish.
rubslopes
I know Dredge, and yes, that's a good comparison! Both games have an eerie atmosphere that I find comforting.
netrap
Many pictures missing. Search is not great, especially for non scientific names of plants. Like "frogfruit" doesn't find anything. Other than that it's great!!
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jones58
Any chance of a UK version? Based in London and love the UI of this :)
ryebread777
Thanks! I mentioned in another comment but definitely hoping to expand once I've nailed the fundamentals!
danielvaughn
I really love the custom icons, it makes me wish the thumbnails were botanist illustrations.
ryebread777
That would be so cool! I'd love to explore generating images like that with AI.
danielvaughn
I bet LLMs would be pretty good at that since there's likely a large repository of public domain botany drawings from the past few hundred years.
wizzwizz4
I'd consider that deceptive. Botanist drawings are technical, so I tend to treat illustrations in that style as factual in some sense, but AI can ape the style quite nicely while getting all the details wrong. You wouldn't want AI-generated technical documentation, would you? It's the same here.

Can't you just find images, the same as you find plants? Or manually add them, or something. Maybe commission some, if you can't find anything for a certain plant.

jilles
This is incredible! I can remove this app idea of my "app ideas"-list.
pfdietz
Does it classify by where they are native? Some of us like to plant only plants that are native to where we are living. For others, at least classify by their potential for invasiveness.

Other attributes: toxicity (when eaten or even touched), deer resistance, allelopathic potential, pollinator friendliness.

zamadatix
Another attribute/attribute extension that would be helpful is toxicity for pets in particular.
ryebread777
There is a filter on the plant list for pet-safe! Look for the paw icon. Haven’t pulled this info onto the plant detail page yet though.
zamadatix
I was so focused on the filter drop downs I didn't even think to look for it as a plant category! Thanks
julianeon
I used to be into native plants and that's a big ask.

Assuming a USA buyer, you'd have to ask for their zip code, then match that to the plants, many of which would probably have to be individually coded & entered (the zip codes they are native to), a map blur across the US which would vary for each species.

The binary qualities (toxic/nontoxic) on the other hand seem easy to add.

For invasiveness: that may be a reason why not too many "Amazon for plants" websites exist. But a simple binary "flagged as invasive", like a red dot on its product page, would be a terrific addition.

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ethbr1
> But a simple binary "flagged as invasive", like a red dot on its product page, would be a terrific addition.

Agreed!

In terms of difficulty:benefit, a binary invasive flag would get most of the way there. E.g. English Ivy, Bradford Pears, Mexican Petunia, creeping bamboo.

Buuuuut... this looks like it's mostly for house plants, for which invasiveness is less of a concern.

However, I think it should mostly generalize to outdoor plants as well.

At least in the US, you could simply add USDA hardiness zone [0], which roughly indicates the boundaries a cultivar can survive winter (freezing) and summer (heat), and is almost always listed.

I'd be shocked if there wasn't a zipcode-to-USDAH converter out there.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone#United_States...

ryebread777
It is more targeted at houseplants now but only because that’s what I know more about. Definitely love these ideas and want to make it better suited for outdoor plants. It could also be a good motivator to encourage people to create an account, so that they can get personalized results based on their location! I think hardiness zone and invasive status are good first steps.
ethbr1
It's an awesome site and kudos on the design!

I like the focus on what your target user actually wants (that isn't addressed by existing solutions).

PeterisP
"Flagged as invasive" where? Every invasive species has a place where they're a perfectly nice local native.
julianeon
I was assuming this is US-oriented, so invasive in the US was my presumption. If the customer base also includes Europe, it could accommodate that also. On the other hand, if you're assuming the userbase is truly global, that would get complicated.
PeterisP
I wonder if there are any invasive species between US states - like, some plant that's native to Florida but invasive in California, or native to California but invasive in Hawaii?
fareesh
How does one map 6000 plants to 6000 products across other websites?

Is it done via some loose matching of keywords which is not verified by hand, or is there some kind of global identification system that is used by each of the sites?

Or is it done in collaboration with the sites?

ryebread777
The process is a combination of things. right now most of the work is done by a massive regex. I also do some manual labeling. Exploring some other solutions too. But accurate mappings are a high priority for the site!
majkinetor
It would be cool to add a sort of public plant wikipedia with info on care about a plant. I love to keep plants, but some are just hard to maintain right.
JohnHaugeland
> I would greatly appreciate any feedback on the site as well as any advice on how to grow it.

This is very cool

Things I would want:

1. Appropriate growing zone (ideally USDA hardiness zone low and high limit for Americans; others for other countries)

2. Filter by produces food

3. Needs pollinating partner; if so, what's appropriate (eg if you're looking at a Bing cherry it should tell you required and to get a Stella Ann, a Van, or a Black Tartarian; if you're looking at a Bavay's Green Gage it should tell you not required, but providing will double yield, and to get an Italian Blue Plum.)

4. Producing time-of-year

5. Water requirements (people in Arizona shouldn't grow rice)

6. Importation issues (many of these will be unavailable to a Floridian or a Californian by mail)

7. Sunlight requirements

8. Indoor appropriate

9. Container size if any

10. Soil acidity requirements

11. Filter by live plant vs seed vs whatever

12. Planting time of year

ryebread777
This is an awesome list with many things I’d never thought of! Thanks for taking the time to write it out. Seems like requirements for the gardening user and the houseplant user vary pretty substantially!
ttyprintk
Aquatic might be its own section, really a freshwater fish tank section.
ryebread777
Ah yes, there is already a category for aquatic, but you're right that they should really have their own set of filters and everything else too. (foreground / background plant, needs CO2, water PH, etc.). Im wondering if there is a way to provide a tailored user experience based on what the user is interested in, but I feel that will explode in complexity.