from Hacker News

Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6k plants

by ryebread777 on 5/6/24, 11:42 AM with 132 comments

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.

  • by OwenFM on 5/6/24, 9:52 PM

    I couldn't see any way for me to specify my location, to ensure I could actually buy the plants.

    Upon clicking one of the plants, I see it was only American sites.

    I get that this is just a hobby for the moment, but even if there was just a note somewhere, "USA only", that would have been appreciated.

    It still irks me how Americans tend to treat the other 96% of the world as though we don't even exist on the same planet; that we're some sort of exotic tourist destination, or a spawn point for immigrants.

  • by the__alchemist on 5/6/24, 2:06 PM

    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.

  • by pfdietz on 5/6/24, 3:52 PM

    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.

  • by JohnHaugeland on 5/6/24, 7:25 PM

    > 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

  • by jihadjihad on 5/6/24, 1:46 PM

    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!

  • by voisin on 5/6/24, 2:12 PM

    I’d love if this included outdoor plants, shrubs, trees, and had a filter for hardiness zone.

  • by majkinetor on 5/6/24, 6:47 PM

    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.

  • by gerdesj on 5/6/24, 11:14 PM

    Great job. What about a dichotomous key (DK) for search as well as filters? Let's say you know quite a few attributes but not the name, you should be able to use a DK to home in on the plant. I note you are a data scientist so you'll know how best to mine the data to make that work. You will need quite a lot more attributes but those might be bought in from elsewhere.

  • by chris_armstrong on 5/7/24, 4:26 AM

    I'd love to do something like this for Australian native plants. It seems like quite a lot of work though!

  • by danielvaughn on 5/6/24, 3:11 PM

    I really love the custom icons, it makes me wish the thumbnails were botanist illustrations.

  • by fareesh on 5/6/24, 4:11 PM

    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?

  • by piva00 on 5/6/24, 1:32 PM

    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!

  • by lovegrenoble on 5/6/24, 6:42 PM

  • by jilles on 5/6/24, 3:35 PM

    This is incredible! I can remove this app idea of my "app ideas"-list.

  • by stephenitis on 5/7/24, 1:14 AM

    A cool feature would to be to show youtube search results and care guides that reference the plant in question.

    Every page I open I've been going to youtube to check on videos of the plants

  • by z3t4 on 5/6/24, 1:39 PM

    How did you find the images? How did you solve the copyright issue?

  • by Suppafly on 5/8/24, 7:53 PM

    How do you decide which plants to list? Is it just the inventory from a few niche sellers? Seems to be missing a lot of really common plants. I couldn't find apple or pear trees for instance.

    Honestly just checking it out briefly, it didn't seem super useful. Why is there no way to sort by your plant hardiness zone?

  • by osonfiget on 5/10/24, 11:09 AM

    Very nice! Clean design and plants.

    Any pointers or guides that can get me started on a similar project? Reading through your responses here, I understand you're using Django and React. While I have some programming knowledge, I haven't worked on web apps.

  • by fjsooner on 5/6/24, 10:33 PM

    I think it’s funny, though clearly reasonable, but searching for either “poison ivy” or “poison oak” both return 0 results.

  • by smusamashah on 5/6/24, 1:58 PM

    Nice to see it includes Airplants as well.

  • by rlhf on 5/7/24, 1:40 AM

    It's really good to get this when you have pets at home. btw, I love the web design.

  • by mft_ on 5/6/24, 1:44 PM

    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?

  • by komali2 on 5/7/24, 2:11 AM

    This is really cool! I love the clean design.

    I'm a little confused though, the prices are showing in USD and not NTD, and for some reason all the stores are in some country called "The United States?" I don't live there.

    ;)

  • by 8mobile on 5/7/24, 4:55 AM

    hi, I like the idea but the quality and diversity of the photos is not much. I would also like to know the characteristics of the plant, whether it resists the cold or whether it needs to be watered often.

  • by vidyesh on 5/6/24, 2:00 PM

    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?

  • by eclipticplane on 5/6/24, 9:28 PM

    Oh. Oh no. This is an extremely dangerous site for me to know about.

  • by cactusplant7374 on 5/6/24, 6:47 PM

  • by captainkrtek on 5/6/24, 10:12 PM

    This is really nice! Thanks for making this and sharing!

  • by noashavit on 5/6/24, 8:04 PM

    This is great, thanks for feeding my addiction :-)

  • by McSnacky on 5/11/24, 9:17 AM

    This really is an amazing website. And you earn money by affiliates?

  • by contingencies on 5/6/24, 11:12 PM

    Hey, also a plant lover here. I also have experienced great frustration sourcing plants and pondered a similar platform. Haven't acted on it as too busy with existing projects. Issues not dealt with in your platform: plants with no known source should be hidden by default, shipping issues such as international and interstate restrictions on mailing plant material should be recognised, time and cost should be respected including currency exchange rates, and the options of growing from seed or spore should be in-scope.

    If you want to grow it, my suggestion would be to use a social model, so allow people to store information about their own garden and then share a feed of events like "I planted this!" or "This flowered!" or "This reproduced!" or "I collected seeds!" to draw people to your platform. Sharing material and the use of endemic plants should be encouraged where possible, not just outright commercialism.

    The gold standard today for accessible all-species info at the global level is iNaturalist (pulls in nice maps plus taxonomy plus Wikipedia, though unfortunately does not really delineate in the map between nominal natural range and current range). Not sure how you do it now but frankly it would be somewhat superfluous to attempt to reproduce such information independently, for example by maintaining your own image database.

    Other things that can draw people to a site would include seasonally appropriate gardening tips (plant or fertilise or prune X now before Y season, check Z for A/B/C pest situation, clone P now, etc.), a relevant local events feed (which opens up potential travel revenue streams such as hotels, flights, group tours, etc.), and academic and publishing news in related areas.

    Many of the nurseries have problems maintaining up to date stock lists. To commercialise, it may be useful to help them do so. To motivate them to get on the platform, you could for example allow parties to sign up for future purchases of crops not yet matured but with an estimate readiness date, thereby assisting the grower with cashflow and sales pipelining.

  • by chelmzy on 5/6/24, 1:58 PM

    Would it be possible to add a location filter for native ranges of the plants?

  • by jones58 on 5/6/24, 2:54 PM

    Any chance of a UK version? Based in London and love the UI of this :)

  • by johncole on 5/6/24, 1:53 PM

    How long did it take you to move from v1 to v2 to v3?

    Cool site!

  • by bandura on 5/8/24, 3:47 AM

    I wish someone come and save my plant

  • by marban on 5/6/24, 1:39 PM

    How do you pull in the commercial offers?

  • by rishikeshs on 5/6/24, 8:06 PM

    Why did you move away from django?

  • by Exuma on 5/6/24, 8:29 PM

    nice... ive had this on my todo list to build for quite a long time, but you beat me to it.

  • by stephenitis on 5/7/24, 1:12 AM

    one of the hottest trending plants, the monstera thai constellation is missing

  • by coldtrait on 5/7/24, 6:32 AM

    Can I add missing plants?

  • by wly_cdgr on 5/6/24, 7:24 PM

    Very cool, thank you.

  • by netrap on 5/6/24, 2:44 PM

    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!!

  • by ivolimmen on 5/6/24, 1:41 PM

    I am a bit disappointed; I was expecting plants that cost a minimum of 6K... But: I do like the site!

  • by rubslopes on 5/6/24, 2:37 PM

    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.

  • by newrotik on 5/6/24, 2:10 PM

    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!