Build, Dont Buy

Aflora is a personal plant management progressive web app I built to bring some structure to a hobby that had quietly grown out of control. What started as a few aquarium plants and windowsill succulents turned into a sprawling collection across multiple tanks, shelves, and an outdoor stand. There finally came a point where I needed something better than a mental inventory.

The app runs as a Progressive Web App (PWA), meaning it installs on mobile like a native app without going through an app store. The core features are organized around how I actually interact with my plants day to day; a Tasks tab for care reminders and scheduled maintenance, a plant wish list tab, and a Plant.Net powered identification tab that lets me point my camera at an unknown specimen and get a species match on the spot.

One of the more practical additions is weather integration via Open-Meteo, which pulls hyperlocal forecast data and surfaces alerts relevant to plant care. This is useful when you have an outdoor pond that needs attention before a cold front comes through, or when climate change pushes those temps up past what any Pothos has ever experienced.

Under the hood Aflora is a Flask backend with a React frontend, running self-hosted on my home infrastructure. Plant data is stored in SQLite alongside locally cached images originally sourced from myplantin.com. The PWA service worker handles offline access so the app stays usable even without a connection.

It’s a small project, but it’s one that actually gets used daily.