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Spent $120 on a fancy plant ID app that was totally useless
I bought this highly-rated plant identification app last spring (about 4 months ago) for $120 a year, thinking it would help me identify all the wildflowers on my hikes. But every time I snapped a photo of something like a simple daisy or a fern, it gave me the wrong species or just said 'unknown'. After wasting 3 weekends trying to use it, I switched back to my old field guide book which works way better. Has anyone else tried those expensive ID apps and found them to be a total ripoff?
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logan_anderson405mo ago
My buddy dropped $150 on one of those apps and it kept calling his neighbor's cat a "rare shrub." He deleted it after a week and went back to using Google for free.
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alex8205mo ago
A buddy of mine paid $200 for a plant identifier and it told him his oak tree was a "rare tropical fern." The thing was useless in a normal yard because the training data was all from a rainforest biome or something. I kept my money and just use Google Lens or Reddit threads to ID stuff for free. Those pay apps are a scam for most people unless you're doing something really specific like tracking invasive species in the wild.
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the_faith5mo ago
The neighbor's cat as a rare shrub" is hilarious but honestly my friend's app once told her a squirrel was a "juvenile badger" and she spent like 20 minutes trying to track it.
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