Your garden has always had a story.
Percy is the first thing that's ever been able to tell it.
How Percy started
I’ll give you the short, less indulgent version first.
I have three notebooks with six entries each, none of them dated, one of them containing a grocery list. I did not simply remember things. Then I realized AI made something possible for gardeners that had never existed before: an actual garden memory. A way to capture time and understand your garden across seasons. What you planted, picked, and noticed. What worked. What was beautiful. And what your kid said when she found the first strawberry of summer. Once I saw that, I couldn’t not build it.
That’s the story. Here’s the longer version, starting with the part where I was bad at this.
I didn’t start out as much of a gardener. A few terra cotta pots on a city patio. Some basil that bolted the moment it sensed my optimism, and some mint that staged a hostile takeover of the entire operation. I thought I understood gardening because I killed plants in a more informed way.
Then we moved to the suburbs. A few raised beds became a few more raised beds. I planted fruit trees. I pulled out a section of invasive privet and turned it into a pollinator garden. What started as a casual interest became, quietly and without warning, one of the most meaningful parts of my life.
I’ve thought a lot about what gardening actually gives you.
The obvious answer is tomatoes.
The real answer has always been harder to put a finger on. It’s the morning check-in. Going outside with coffee to see what changed overnight. The hummingbird at the zinnias. The kids picking strawberries, none of which make it back to the kitchen. The satisfaction of watching something you started from seed in February becoming the thing feeding your entire family in August. The patience gardening requires, which turns out to be extremely good practice for everything else in a life raising kids who eat all your strawberries.
None of that fits in a spreadsheet column.
I wanted Percy to handle all of it. The plantings and the harvests and the pest problems and the plans for next year, yes. Every tool tries to do that part, and most of them make it feel like homework. But I also wanted Percy to hold onto the rest of it. The enjoyment. The noticing. The specific satisfaction that comes from looking back at a season and realizing what it gave back (much of which can’t be weighed on a produce scale) and the quiet accumulation that comes from caring deeply about one piece of ground for years. Percy makes sure all of it is captured and nothing is lost between Octobers.
I hope it shows.
Why “Percy”?
The name started with perceive — to notice carefully, to pay close attention. That felt right for something built around the idea that noticing your garden is, in fact, the whole point.
But names have a way of revealing themselves once you’ve committed.
Perch: where a bird lands and goes quiet. Just watching.
Per-see: to see completely. The Latin prefix “per-” means “all the way through.” Percy doesn’t half-remember your garden. It sees it fully — across seasons, in the kind of depth that only comes from showing up year after year.
And then there’s Persephone — the goddess of spring, whose whole story is a seasonal cycle. She descends, and winter comes. She returns, and the garden wakes up. Percy holds everything through the dormant months and brings it back when the growing season does.
That felt less like a coincidence and more like the name knew what it was doing all along.
(It also makes a pretty cute name for that bird.)
Who we are
Percy was built by me (Brian). A home gardener who wanted a better way to hold onto what happens out there. And it remains, for now, a one-person passion project.
No venture capital or board of directors or streak counters or passive-aggressive notifications that remind you that you haven’t logged in for eleven days.
Just an attempt to build something genuinely useful for people who love gardening as much as I do, and who’d rather be outside than in front of a screen. It is, somewhat ironically, an AI product built with the goal of helping people spend more time being human.
If you have ideas, feedback, or something growing you want to tell someone about, I’d genuinely love to hear it. Especially if you know what to do about the slugs.
hello@percy.gardenSupport indie software. Percy isn’t venture-backed. Your subscription supports one person doing careful, deliberate work to support his family (and his seed catalog habit, which has gotten out of hand). There are no ads or data mining or features added because an algorithm decided they’d improve retention. Just a gardening tool built by someone who actually gardens, for people who actually garden, priced so it costs about what you’d spend at the garden center before you’ve made it past the annuals.
Your garden has always had a story. Percy is the first thing that’s ever been able to tell it.
Percy doesn’t just remember your garden. It changes how you see it.
Free for your first growing season. Then $39/year as a Founding Member, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. The price will rise as Percy grows. Yours won’t. No credit card required. Your data is yours regardless.
Free for your entire first season.
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