My Tiny Pot is not a device. It is an ordinary 8 inch terracotta pot from any garden centre, plus a kit calibrated to it exactly — so the app can stop estimating and start calculating.
Every countertop garden sells you a machine — pumps, LEDs, proprietary pods, a subscription. We think the pot was already solved about four thousand years ago.
Fired clay breathes. Water leaves through the walls as well as the top, which means roots get air and it is very difficult to overwater — and overwatering is how most houseplants actually die. It costs about eight dollars, it is in every garden centre on earth, and it looks like an object rather than an appliance.
The three things that decide whether a water model is right, and that you cannot easily get right on your own:
Get those three fixed and the app knows precisely how much water your pot holds, how fast it loses it, and when it will run out. That accuracy is the product. The pot is just a pot, and you should buy the one you like.
An 8 inch terracotta on a windowsill. These come out of the same model that runs in the app, so the number on this page and the number on your phone cannot disagree.
| Plant | Water every | Fits an 8in? |
|---|---|---|
| 🌶️ Radish | 13 days | Yes |
| 🌱 Microgreens | 11.7 days | Yes |
| 🥕 Carrot | 11.1 days | Yes |
| 🌿 Cilantro | 9.4 days | Yes |
| 🥬 Spinach | 7.6 days | Yes |
| 🥬 Lettuce | 6.3 days | Yes |
| 🌿 Basil | 4.7 days | Go 10 inch |
| 🍅 Tomato | 1.3 days | Far too big |
Everything except the pot.
The Grow Kit with the pot and saucer already in it. Sold in person rather than posted; terracotta is heavy and breaks.
Substrate top-up, two seeds and feed. Everything consumable, none of the hardware.
Phase 1 is in build. The waitlist is a real inbox, not a funnel.
There is a second way to run this, and it is the laziest form of growing there is. Kratky is passive hydroponics: roots hang into a static nutrient solution, and as the plant drinks, the level drops and an air gap opens for the roots to breathe. No pump, no airstone, no power.
A printed net-cup lid, clay pebbles, rockwool and dry nutrient. Drop the lid onto any sealed opaque jar of about 3.5 litres and a lettuce goes three weeks without being touched.
Every plant sensor on the shelf is a capacitive probe you stick in the dirt. They read one point of the soil, they drift as the coating breaks down, they need recalibrating for every substrate, and eventually they corrode.
A pot's weight is its water content. Not sampled — total. So we weigh the pot instead, and the sensor never touches the soil at all.
A weighing base the pot sits on. Three lights: watered, getting there, water me.
No app. No pairing. No radio at all. It just sits there and tells you.
The same base with Bluetooth. The app shows a measured hydration bar instead of a modelled one.
Talks phone-to-pot directly — no wifi setup, no cloud account, no server in the middle and no monthly fee.
There is no tare button and nothing to calibrate. The lowest weight the base has ever seen is the dry weight — so after one dry-down it knows your pot, your soil and your plant, and every reading after that is exact.
A tag for the underside of any pot. Tap your phone on it and the app loads that exact pot: volume, substrate, what is planted, how long since you watered. Once you own four pots, the app has no idea which one you are standing in front of. This fixes that.
This is where the whole thing is pointed.
Because the pot is just a pot, it can be any pot — including one thrown by hand by someone whose work you like. The maker brief is two numbers: 4.7 litres to a fill line 1.5cm below the rim, and a drainage hole. Everything else — form, glaze, colour, foot, lip — is theirs.
The model does not care that it cost sixty dollars instead of eight. It knows the volume, so the readings stay exact. You start with a pot from a garden centre and you end up with something you actually chose.
Not open yet. Ceramicists who want in: hold the volume and the fill line, tell us whether it is glazed or unglazed so the model can adjust for wall loss, and the rest is your work with your name on it.
Gardentendo turns the pot into something you check on. It is a pixel-art gardening game whose progress bars are real agronomy — growth is growing degree days accumulated from the actual temperatures at your address, and hydration is an evapotranspiration water balance for your actual pot.
It is free, it works with any container you already own, and it will happily tell you that your pot is too small or that the thing you planted was never going to work. Buying a kit just removes the guesswork from its inputs.
Calibrated to a pot you buy anywhere. Ships flat.
The passive option, for people who want to do even less.
Weigh the pot, no soil contact. Works with every method.
A light that clips to the pot rather than a lamp aimed at it. Removes the windowsill limit.
Same numbers, better object.