[HN Gopher] Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6k plants
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Show HN: A free site to explore and discover 6k plants
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.
Author : ryebread777
Score : 293 points
Date : 2024-05-06 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.getanyplant.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.getanyplant.com)
| piva00 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How do you pull in the commercial offers?
| pyuser314 wrote:
| Guess: this person is associated with one of the shops to buy.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Web scraping or using site APIs!
| pyuser314 wrote:
| ha, thanks, that too! Nice site.
| z3t4 wrote:
| How did you find the images? How did you solve the copyright
| issue?
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Could you use AI to generate images for those you don't have
| a real photo of yet?
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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!
| berkes wrote:
| Pl@ntnet has a dataset of 300k images of plants released
| under Creative Commons
| https://zenodo.org/records/5645731#.YeGDOdvjKWh
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Awesome!! Surprised I didn't know that as I've explored
| plantnet in the past. I'll add those in!
| ivolimmen wrote:
| I am a bit disappointed; I was expecting plants that cost a
| minimum of 6K... But: I do like the site!
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I was expecting a lot of photos of plants in very high
| resolution
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Don't worry, If you are interested in buying $6k plants I will
| create a new site just for you lol
| pvg wrote:
| For that high-end market segment, I'd be thinking recurring
| revenue - plant subscriptions, plant timeshares, plant
| concierge service, etc.
| mft_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mft_ wrote:
| Temperature range = hardiness zone, I think?
|
| Also... soil pH, maybe?
| mtgentry wrote:
| Would be cool to sort by 'community' too. If you get really
| deep into native planting, folks recommend you get plants
| native to your geographic area. California has lots of
| these communities for example:
| https://www.laspilitas.com/nature-of-california/communities
| mtgentry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How long did it take you to move from v1 to v2 to v3?
|
| Cool site!
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What were the jupyter notebooks for? Did you run your backend
| in notebooks?
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Would it be possible to add a location filter for native ranges
| of the plants?
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nice to see it includes Airplants as well.
| vidyesh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure! Happy to answer most things as I'm looking to share but
| also to get feedback and new ideas on those topics.
| vidyesh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Currently evaluating alternatives for hosting images rn.
| Open to any suggestions!
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| newrotik wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That begs the question ... How did you come up with that plant
| database ?
| voisin wrote:
| I'd love if this included outdoor plants, shrubs, trees, and had
| a filter for hardiness zone.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This might be a stretch, but I would love to know what
| outdoor plants are native to my area.
| jefb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The first thing I looked for was hardiness zone. I live in
| Minnesota and our weather is...particular.
| berkes wrote:
| Pl@ntnet does that.
|
| What's even cooler, is that they release all their data as open
| data1. So you could create highly specialized listings if you
| want.
|
| 1
| https://www.gbif.org/publisher/da86174a-a605-43a4-a5e8-53d48...
| rubslopes wrote:
| 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.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I know Dredge, and yes, that's a good comparison! Both games
| have an eerie atmosphere that I find comforting.
| netrap wrote:
| 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!!
| jones58 wrote:
| Any chance of a UK version? Based in London and love the UI of
| this :)
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Thanks! I mentioned in another comment but definitely hoping to
| expand once I've nailed the fundamentals!
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I really love the custom icons, it makes me wish the thumbnails
| were botanist illustrations.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| That would be so cool! I'd love to explore generating images
| like that with AI.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| 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.
| jilles wrote:
| This is incredible! I can remove this app idea of my "app
| ideas"-list.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Another attribute/attribute extension that would be helpful is
| toxicity for pets in particular.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was so focused on the filter drop downs I didn't even
| think to look for it as a plant category! Thanks
| julianeon wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _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_Sta
| tes...
| PeterisP wrote:
| "Flagged as invasive" where? Every invasive species has a
| place where they're a perfectly nice local native.
| fareesh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| This one is my favorite:
| https://www.getanyplant.com/plant/2500f2a3a54f3eb7b6163879ec...
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Carnivorous plants:
|
| https://www.getanyplant.com/plants?query=carnivorous
| majkinetor wrote:
| 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.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Very cool, thank you.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| noashavit wrote:
| This is great, thanks for feeding my addiction :-)
| rishikeshs wrote:
| Why did you move away from django?
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Still using Django, but now I'm using react for front end. This
| made it a lot easier for me to create a clean modern looking
| UI.
| Exuma wrote:
| nice... ive had this on my todo list to build for quite a long
| time, but you beat me to it.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Would love to hear how you envisioned it differently if you're
| down to share.
| eclipticplane wrote:
| Oh. Oh no. This is an extremely dangerous site for me to know
| about.
| OwenFM wrote:
| 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.
| ryebread777 wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback - sharing this project has really
| opened my eyes to my own bias there. Still thinking through how
| to best expand the site to other countries but in the meantime
| I'll make sure to mention that the site is US-centric when I
| share it going forward.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| This is really nice! Thanks for making this and sharing!
| fjsooner wrote:
| I think it's funny, though clearly reasonable, but searching for
| either "poison ivy" or "poison oak" both return 0 results.
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