Looks nice, but overpriced.
I wanted to wait about 6 months before writing a review to fully get an idea of how good Gardyn is. Unfortunately, I'm not impressed, and am severely disappointed. To start, the membership and price per plant is beyond insane. You can pick up 100 1 inch rock wool squares on Amazon for about 10 bucks, buy your own seeds at 250 seeds for 4.95, and either reuse the pods, or replace them with pods you can find online for about 5 dollars per 50 pods. That's 100 plants for about 25 bucks, while the same amount gets you a whopping 4-5 plants from garden. Yikes, holy markup. With that kind of mark-up, you really have to wonder what makes the system cost 800 buckaroonies other than gimacs and how much markup there is on that. With the membership you get Kelby, which is supposed to be a virtual assistant, but I didn't see much difference between when it was on and after I cancled my membership. My plants grew the same. They're plants. That's what they do. For the most part I got messages like "your plants are growing!" or "add water!" and "check out these new plants you can buy!". You get 10 "free" pods a month with the membership, but you pay 40 dollars a month for the membership. So that's 4 dollars a plant in the reality where things still cost money (it's not free if you pay 40 dollars a month for it). If you read above, you'll see this is an insane amount of money for a bit of rock wool and seeds in a plastic container. The system setup is nice and compact, but the app and system is severely lacking for 800 dollars. First, Gardyn won't work on 5ghz WiFi, so you either need to run separate networks, or screw around in your router to get Gardyn to only connect to the 2.4ghz network if you have a router that manages the network devices use automatically. Second, if you don't get the membership, you don't get push notifications on your phone when water level is low, and Gardyn doesn't shut off the pump when it detects it's low. You'll walk in to hear it grinding away. However, Gardyn is more than happy to give push notifications to your phone when they have new plants available for purchase for the low low price of 5.99 plus shipping and handling. Gardyn is nice if you live in an apartment and don't have the space. But for most people, I don't see the difference or justification for Gardyn over aerogarden, or simply building your own system out of PVC piping for a couple hundred bucks.