Plant identification
Point the camera, get a care plan
Identification is the boring part that has to happen before anything useful can. Kounts Care does it in a few seconds and turns the answer into a schedule.
Most houseplants arrive without a useful label. Someone gives you one at a housewarming, you inherit one from a flat you moved into, or the garden centre tag says nothing more specific than green plant. Until you know the species you cannot know how often to water it, how much light it wants, or whether it is dangerous to your cat. Kounts Care treats identification as the setup step it is: photograph the plant, confirm what came back, and the watering, feeding and misting schedule is built for you.
How it works
On device first, always free
Apple's own vision models and, where Apple Intelligence is available, its on-device language model take the first pass. That runs offline, costs nothing and is not metered, so identifying plants never becomes a resource you ration.
Then the plant database, for an exact species
For a specific binomial rather than a family, the photo is checked against Pl@ntNet, a plant identification database. That request is hard-bounded at eight seconds, so a slow connection delays you rather than blocking you.
Never a dead end
When the result is not confident enough, you get the family's most popular members as options rather than a false certainty. A basil photo that only reaches the herb family still offers Basil one tap away, and manual search is always adjacent.
A care plan even for the unknown
A plant outside the 148 hand-authored catalogue gets a starter watering and feeding plan generated on device, clamped to safe bounds, or falls back to the identified botanical family's presets. An unusual plant still gets sensible intervals.
The details that matter
What the identification actually returns
A species where it can manage one, and a family where it cannot, along with the common name, the botanical name and the care profile attached to it: light, humidity range, temperature range and soil pH. That profile is what makes the rest of the app useful, because it is the difference between water every seven days and water when you remember.
The safety check happens in the same moment
If your household has a cat or a dog on a profile, identifying a plant runs it against ASPCA toxicity data before the profile is saved. A severe result takes over the screen. This is the point in the flow where the warning is genuinely useful, which is why it lives here rather than in a settings screen.
Every attempt is recorded
The app stores what was tried and what came back, so a plant identified badly can be corrected later without losing its history, and the identification engines can be improved or replaced without disturbing your profiles.
What it does not do
It does not diagnose a sick plant from a photo. If your monstera has brown patches and you want software to tell you why, that is a different product and this one will not pretend to it.
What this costs
On-device identification is unlimited and free at every tier. Online lookups against the plant database are limited to three per install on the free tier, then unlimited with Premium at $19.99 a year or $34.99 once. Toxicity warnings are free at every tier regardless of how the plant was identified.
Questions, answered
Is there a free plant identifier for iPhone?
Kounts Care's on-device identification is free and unmetered, which covers most common houseplants. The online database lookup, which gets you an exact species rather than a family, is free for the first three per install and then part of Premium.
How accurate is it?
Good on common houseplants, less certain on rare cultivars and on anything photographed badly. It deliberately shows uncertainty as a list of options rather than presenting a guess as a fact, because a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest maybe when a toxicity check depends on it.
Does my photo leave the phone?
Only for an online lookup, and only the photo you chose to identify. It goes to the Pl@ntNet API with no personal information attached. On-device identification sends nothing anywhere, and you can stay entirely on device if you prefer.
What if it gets my plant wrong?
Change it. Manual search is always available, and correcting a profile keeps its history and updates the care plan and any toxicity warning to match the new species.
Keep everything alive.
One calm app for the plants on your shelf and the animals on your sofa. Five profiles free, no account.
See also: How the toxicity warnings work · New plant parents · Kounts Care vs PictureThis