Hello, I am Benjamin
I work full time in the ambulance service. Plot Trak is not a company and there is no team behind it. It is one person, building the garden planner he could not find, in the hours around his shifts.
I started this because I was a bad gardener
I did not grow up growing things. When I started, I did not know when to sow, when to plant out, what liked sun and what sulked in it, or why the thing I put in last month had done nothing at all. What I wanted was an app that would simply tell me. Not a forum to search, not a blog post written for a climate that is not mine, just a straight answer for a garden in Britain, and something that would remember what I had done so I did not have to.
So I went looking. I tried most of the planners out there, and every one of them did some of it. One had a good catalogue and no way to plan a bed. One drew a lovely plan and then had nothing to say about what to put in it. One tracked plantings but could not tell me the first thing about the plant. I kept ending up with two apps open and a notebook on the windowsill, and it seemed daft that the thing I wanted did not exist when all the pieces of it clearly did.
I had a long list of ideas by then. Things that were not essential, but that I kept wishing for and could not find anywhere: rain that counted towards watering instead of being ignored, a seed tin that knew what was in it, some honest sense of whether a crop would actually come to anything if I sowed it this late. Nice to haves, all of them. None of the planners offered any of it. Eventually it stopped feeling like a gap in the market and started feeling like something I should just go and build.
The cats are the reason for one whole feature
My family has always had dogs, and these days there are three cats in the house as well. Anyone with animals who has ever put a plant in the ground knows the small pause that follows: is that one going to hurt them if they chew it. It is a simple question and it turns out to be a genuinely hard one to answer well. The information is scattered, a lot of it is written for other countries, and plenty of what you find online is confidently wrong.
Not one of the planners I tried would answer it at all. So Plot Trak does. Every crop in the catalogue carries a pet safety result for cats and for dogs, and every result explains its own reasoning rather than showing you a green tick and hoping you trust it. Where the evidence is thin, it says so instead of guessing, because a confident wrong answer about your cat is worse than no answer at all. That single feature took longer than almost anything else in the app, and I would build it again tomorrow.
And I wanted to see my garden, not a floor plan
The other thing I kept coming back to was that every planner I found was flat. A top down grid, seen from above, like a spreadsheet with soil in it. That is fine for measuring, but it is not what a garden is, and it is not how you picture one when you are standing in it in February trying to imagine what July looks like.
What I actually wanted was closer to building a house in The Sims. Put the bed there, stand the greenhouse next to it, walk round and look at the thing from the angle you would really see it from. So that is what Plot Trak is. The 3D view is the planner itself rather than a picture generated afterwards, you can plan the whole plot in it, and there is a flat plan sitting alongside for the jobs a flat plan is better at. Watching your own garden come together on screen, with the crops you actually chose, turns out to be far more useful than I expected, and quite a lot more fun.
What I am trying to build
Plot Trak is built for gardeners like me. People who are keen but not expert, who want to be told the useful thing at the useful moment, and who would rather spend the evening in the garden than working out what an app wants from them. The planner and the whole crop catalogue are free, with no ads, no account to make and no limit on how much you plan. Nothing about your garden is uploaded anywhere, because it is yours and it is nobody else’s business.
There is a paid tier, and it exists to keep the lights on rather than to hold anything hostage. I would rather charge a fair price to the people who want the extras than sell advertising space in somebody’s vegetable patch.
Because it is only me, every message reaches me directly. If you find a bug, I am the one who fixes it. If you ask for a feature, I am the one who decides. If a crop is missing or the app tells you something that is wrong, please do tell me, because a great deal of what is in Plot Trak today came from somebody taking the time to say so. I cannot promise to build everything, but I read all of it, and I would genuinely rather hear from you than not.